It’s the first week in January. Thanksgiving was ages ago. Christmas is two weeks gone and even New Year—when your parents let you stay up until midnight—is a distant memory, and school has started up again. From now on, for the foreseeable future, it is simply winter, and there is nothing to do but eat the remaining Christmas candy and play with the toys you got for Christmas that have not yet broken.

These were the candies we got in our stocking, or in a big tin from the supermarket. They were mostly bland, but the long white ones with the red stripes were good, and if you could find a red one shaped like a berry, that was excellent.

If the weather was horrible, which it often was, and we couldn’t go outside, we would play Pic-up Stix. Yes kids, you took a bunch of sticks, dropped them, and then picked them up. It’s what we did before computer games. Hours of fun.

Also. On cold, windy days—and especially during black outs—we’d play a lot of card games. One was Old Maid. I forget the rules, but it’s basically the same as Hearts. The deck pictured is the exact same one I had, and even back then, young as I was, I felt the picture was a little unfair.

Another indoor game, handy for when nobody wanted to play cards or Pic-up Stix, was soldiers. There were no rules, just small, plastic soldiers. You set them up, moved them around, and made up your own stories. It sounds sad even writing that, but on the other hand, we had a lot more imagination back then.

This is a ViewMaster. You put the View Master Reels—the disks—into the viewer and pushed a lever and the pictures would rotate. Sometime it would be a story, other times just pictures. But the view was stereoscopic and the pictures looked 3D. It was cutting edge stuff when I was young.

When I was a teenager, I got one of these. They weren’t around when I was younger. Back then we used reel-to-reel tape recorders, and I had one of those, too. But the Panasonic cassette tape deck was a giant step forward. You could sit in your room, listening to the radio, with your fingers hovering over the Play/Record buttons, waiting for you favorite song to come on. And when it did, you hit the buttons and prayed everyone in the house would remain quiet, or that your mom wouldn’t call you for dinner, so you could record the song without any external noise. You waited holding your breath, until the song ended and the DJ started talking and then you hit STOP.

Getting a full, uninterrupted song on the cassette was a mixture of skill and luck, and we were always overjoyed and relieved when we captured one.

Spotify? What’s that?

If we were able to get outside, and it was a warm day, we’d sometimes blow bubbles using the method shown on the left, involving a bent paperclip and a homemade concoction of dish soap and water. The idea of blowing multiple bubbles at one time never even occurred to us. That technology was years away.

Outdoors, we’d also play army, or cowboys and Indians, or cops and robbers, anything that involved shooting other people. Sometimes, I’d play on my own because that was how I spent a lot of my time. But alone, or in groups, or as a cowboy, soldier, or bank robber, I’d have a gun that shot either roll caps or Greenie Stick-um caps.

I don’t know if they are still available, but “caps” were small amounts of gunpowder that went BANG when you hit it. That could mean in your pretend gun, or with a rock or hammer if you wished. The Greenie Stick-ums were green (duh) and had to be peeled off and stuck to something. These were used in pretend flintlock rifles and pistols, or used in booby-traps, or whatever else you could imagine using them for. Did I mention we had good imaginations back in the day?

A definite outdoor gift would be a BB gun. I got one when I was ten or eleven. I don’t know if they give BB guns to young kids anymore because: “You’ll shoot your eye out!” That, sadly, is not a cliché or an urban myth. My dad had his eye shot out with a BB gun when he was 9, and I almost had mine shot out when we were playing BB Gun Wars and I peeked over the parapet and my buddy Bob shot me just about an inch below my right eye. We were 16 and should have known better. So, yeah, don’t give BB Guns to young (or even older) kids.

Inside or outside, you could play with one of these. I didn’t have one when I was a kid because the technology wasn’t available, but my younger siblings had them. The wheel would spin and move down and up the metal track as you turned it upside down and right side up. You took your excitement where you could find it in those days.

This would not have been a Christmas present, but it deserves a mention because I can’t imagine any kid alive today would believe we actually did this.

There was a toy, shaped like a motor, that you could attach to your bike, and it would make motor-type noises so you could pretend you were riding a motorcycle. If you couldn’t get one of those toys, you just took a spare card, attached it to your bike wheel with a clothespin and got a similar result.

I know it sounds sad, but what else did we have to do? Cable TV hadn’t been invented yet.