May I ask what this is?
The trees were switching over to the miniature lights and the c-7’s with the reflector disks were retired. The super large lights were still on the houses, but not for much longer. The decorations didn’t move and the nativity scenes were light by a flood light with rotating color disk. You wore a tie to church if a boy and a dress if a girl. I had little miniature clip on bow ties for church and a clip on tie. They put scented hair lotions on you and gave you a slick hair job. The tie and hair were more of a 60’s thing, as was this. We had a drunk Santa on Friday nights on main street, and he ended up later getting the axe for some perversity with childern. I still shudder when I think of us al sitting on his lap, and the alcohol fumes chocking me.
Walkie talkies and cassette recorders were the in thing for the kids gift. A lot of CB’s were on the road and in the houses of adults. You got stuff like a chemistry set and microscope for Christmas. The relatives came over for Christmas dinner, and their were about 30 people in a five room house. The food was pickle crab apples, at least 3 kinds of canned pickles, pickled beets, brown’n serve rolls, buttered bread, ham in pineapple brown sugar glaze, turkey, gelled cranberries, about five gelatin and fruit desserts, about 10 different cookies, multiple cakes, baked beans, green beans, corn, carrot sticks, celery, dill dip, cheese, crackers, and summer sausage. The color TV replaced the B&W set in the seventies. You made sure you were home for the Christmas specials, because you wouldn’t get to watch it otherwise. Peanuts was a fresh modern cartoon. Snoopy was famous as Joe Cool and the Red Baron. They played jazz and the adults went "Wah Wah Waaah Wah. Dolly Madison sponsored all the Peanuts Cartoons. The Royal Guardsmen sang a lot of Snoopy songs like “Snoopy’s Christmas”, “Snoopy Verses the Red Baron”, “The Smallest Astronaut”, and "Snoopy for President. The classic animated Christmas shows were all new. The Christmas specials were full of vaudeville comedy, live bands, and Broadway stars. You had Gene Autry singing his “Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer”. Oli Yorgesson singing his “Jingle Bells” only it was Yingle Bells, Yingle Bells. Pearl Bailey singing “A Five Pound Box of Money”. Earthia Kitt singing “This Year’s Santa Baby”. Flip Wilson doing his comedy hour. His Geraldine character was excellent. Carol Burnett was going strong with the regular guests all at their peek in their careers. Dolly Parton was a fresh young singer that was still on her way to the top, and Loretta Lynn was the “Darling” of the show. Hee Haw was on every weekend. “Get Smart”, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, “Giligans Island”, and “Space 1999” were on television. James Bond was out every few years with their best material, and you saw the moon landings. You figured that we’d have a moonbase when you were an adult and the “Aliens” movies came out Erma Bombeck was at her peek writing her great humor books like “If Life Is A Bowl Of Cherries, What Am I Doing In The Pits?”, and “The Grass Is Always Greener Over The Septic Tank”. The radio stations put together comedy tapes from song snippets. You got free samples in the mail ever once in a while. I’ll mention something that was near the end of the 70’s and bled into the 80’s about three years. “Animal Stories” with “Uncle Larr” and “Snot Nosed Little Tommy”.
More toys: Light Bright, Tinker Toys, Log Blocks, Domino’s, Thing Maker, Encredable Edibles, Easy Bake, G.I. Joe, Mrs. Beasly Doll, Barrel of Monkeys, Cats Craddle with the string, marbles (Boulders) (Peries) (Cats Eyes) (Steelies), Hula Hoops, Frisbies, Yo Yo’s, Linoel trains and the newer HO scale trains. Erector Sets, Lawn Jarts, Horse Shows, Ice Skating and bonfires with weiners and popcorn, Roller Skates, Banna Bikes, Bicycles, Tricycles, Boyscout Candy at $2 a box, Shoveling neighbors walks for a buck. Ok so I got off track again.
Mood Rings
Rock Tumblers
Resin Paper Weight Kits
The View Master Projector
Super Elastic Bubble Plastic
Hot Wheels topped the hhot toys list.
Electric Race Car Sets - I got the Tyco London Bridge set.
Gyro Tops - Watch it stay suspended on the string , or rotate on a pivot and not touch the ground.
Spirograph
Bizy Bee - A battery bee that you could change colored ink pen cartridges in that made swirls in the paper as you wrote.
The fat multicolored ink pens. The regular one was four colors, but one classmate found the Holy Grail for these pens. It was about fifteen colors.
The two metal disks about 1.5 inches diameter and concave. Hold it in you hand until it inverts from disimilar expansion and set it on a table. A little later it pops into the air when the metals cool.
Super Balls
Pez Dispensers
Punching Balls
Real Boxing Gloves for kids.
Silly String
Magic Kits
Venus Fly Traps from the local dime store.
Mexican Jumpimg Beans at the check outs all rattling away for over a month until they died.
Resurction Plant that you soaked in water to see it uncurl it’s leaves, and curl back up when you let it dry up.
Mad Magazine
Comics from the neighbor that had creatures on the moon. That ended when we landed on the moon.
Saving some bicentenial money to show people in the future.
Looking for Wheat Pennies, Silver Certificate Dollars, and Silver Dollars made from silver.
Stamps
Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew books
Getting a record for Christmas.
I found a kid stuck to a metal flag pole by the tounge. He ripped a few taste buds off and bled in a spectacular way.
Our school had iron railings outside, and many kids found their mittens or hands stuck on it.
The old metal ice cube tray’s would stick to your hand all the time.
My dad and I went to Wards, and bought me a 410 shot gun for Christmas. They were setting on a table with the cleaning kits, shells, and cases.
I remember the fancy ladies and childerns store, with the vinal couches that were a circle that the seats faced out from. I had one column in the middle as a back rest shared by all seated.
Being born - my birthday is a Christmas Eve during the 70’s - although I don’t actually remember it, I think of it with fondness always… 
Grim
*"…I still want a hulla - hoop!.."
Damn you Lady bug now that song’s gonna be stuck in my head all day!
I miss the claymation Cristmas specials
Frosty The Snowman
Rudolf The Red Nose Reindeer etc…
I also miss scaring the shit out of my Mom by popping a blown up sandwhich bas as her and dad were going through the Cristmas lights trying to figure out which ones were bad!!
She fell for every year I tell Ya! 
I also miss the days when I used to preview. :smack:
There is a picture of them at this site Betty's Christmas Reviews – Christmas decorations, Christmas lights, Prelit Artificial Christmas Trees, Holiday Decorations
It’s filled with a liquid, possibly containing toxic chemicals. There is a bulb under the base, so that when the lights are on, the heat from the bulb heats up the liquid, and it bubbles up through the “candle” part.
Ms Macphisto, I’m sure the flavoring was indeed TOXIC CHEMICALS , but yeah, the whole thing was really shoddy. We were suckered in by the commercials that showed happy children eating perfect sno-cones, when it reality, the thing just hacked up ice into smaller ice cubes.
These might be from the late 60s in some cases, but are still standouts:
Perfume Kiddles - the little tiny dolls that smelled like perfume & came in plastic “perfume bottles” - my favorite was Lily of the Valley.
Dancerina - a fairly large ballerina doll with the shockingest pink tutu on the planet. You made her pirouette or toe dance by futzing with her tiara.
Fun Flowers/Creeple Peeple/Incredible Edibles - you made the first two with a plastic goo that you squirted into metal trays and then “baked” on a little heated thing. Incredible Edibles were just that - the edible version. You could make flowers, troll-like heads and/or bugs. The lawsuit probability if these things were in production today would be off the charts
Paint-by-Number sets - pretty self-explanatory.
Spirographs.
Milton Bradley and/or Parker Brothers games - “Operation”, “Mouse Trap”, and whatever that one was where the guy balanced on his nose & you had to add & remove rings from his hands.
VCNJ~
Oops - forgot the Christmas memories:
When Norelco, the sponsor of those Rankin-Bass Christmas shows would change their name to “Noel-co” for the commercials, which featured Santa riding on an electric razor.
The afore-mentioned Rankin-Bass Christmas shows.
The Life Saver candies “books” that we got every year in our stockings. Ditto the Bob’s candy cane, oranges (I never got this - we freakin’ lived in Florida! - although I also got pears - my favorite) and word search puzzle books - another favorite.
Actually being allowed in the living room for something other than piano lessons
My mom’s bourbon ball cookies.
VCNJ~
Funny, I still do that with the Victoria’s Secret catalog…
Excuse me. Back to reality here…
Stereo equipment. My Dad was president of a subsidiary of the old Craig electronics company so I got lots of cool stereo gear. In fact, I still have the cassette deck and belt-drive turntable from the Craig Series 5000 of the early 70’s.
And Hot Wheels. Oh, the fun I used to have building cool race tracks around the living room and using the SuperChargers to keep the cars running around the track. It was rather unsettling, however, when a car got stuck in the SuperCharger house (which was basically two rubber wheels turning quickly and “squicking” a car through, increasing it’s speed). That was a nasty sound.
My nephews now have my extensive Hot Wheels collection. It’s probably not worth anything, collector-wise, but that’s ok, because the fun those cars brought far outweighs any possible monetary gains.
Veuve_ClicquotNJ Veuve_ClicquotNJ, you and I may have been separated at birth - I was typing up a list of most of the things you just mentioned.
And my favorite was lily of the valley too. We always got the Life Savers books, and I was only allowed in the living room for Christmas and Organ lessons. 
Happy memories…
Veuve_ClicquotNJ, you and I may have been separated at birth - I was typing up a list of most of the things you just mentioned.
And my favorite was lily of the valley too. We always got the Life Savers books, and I was only allowed in the living room for Christmas and Organ lessons.
Happy memories…
:eek:
We used to put lights on our flocked trees.
Hai Karate’ aftershave
I think that epitomizes a 1970s Christmas
Was it the one shaped like Snoopy’s house? I TOTALLY wanted that when I was 6 or 7 (81 or 82) but then a friend of mine got one and it turned out to be kinda lame. We enjoyed using it, but my need to own it personally abated.
I was born in '74, so I don’t remember most of my '70s Christmases, but I think my most memorable toy was a Matchbox Cars playset. Another favorite present was a Big Loader, which was basically exactly this but without the Thomas the Tank Engine branding. Sigh.
I also remember my parents’ blue mid-70s vintage Oldsmobile Cutlass conking out on the way home from grandma’s house on Christmas Eve. It might have actually happened in 80 or 81, but it feels like a 70s memory.
I’d totally forgotten the LifeSaver’s books. Those were a stocking stuffer staple (say that three times fast) at our house too.
One of the most 70s Christmas gift assortments I can remember was my sister’s- she got a wicker swing (really really big at the time), a rabbit fur coat (ditto) and hip hugging bell bottoms. I remember in the late 70s getting my first digital watch, similar to the one my brother had saved and paid $40 for a year or two before (half that by the late 70s). The numbers were red and glowing and only came on when you pushed a button on the side.
My favorite smells of Christmas: the chocolate bells, the cedar in the shag carpeting (a good title for a story about a 70s Christmas), the smell of the vinyl in a Best of the West action figure, the smell of leather and, though I was disappointed in them, the smell of the Lincoln Logs.
My cousin and her two little boys used to spend Christmas Eve (when the family exchanged gifts) with us and spend the night until Christmas Morning (Santa Claus). One of my favorite memories is of her two little boys, maybe 3 and 5 at the time and who had slept for perhaps 2 hours during the night and who were the most overindulged kids I’ve ever known (their toys would take up half the living room) running into the room where my father was sleeping and jumping up and down on the antique bed screaming “Uncle Steve! Uncle Steve! You gotta get up! Come see what Santa Claus has brought!” (they’d been told they couldn’t go into the LR until everybody was up). My father, rotund and a particularly old 50 and a major bah-humbug to Christmas anyway, told them “It’s bad luck to wake up early on Christmas! Santa will take his gifts back if you get up before 10. It’s in the Bible. Go away” and rolling over to go back to sleep.
I made a Nativity Set and a New England village every year out of those glossy booklets you bought in supermarkets. Does anybody else remember those? (Do they still have those?) The Nativity Set figures were conical and had a little cardboard stable and for some reason I thought they were elegant (the halo and jewel tones, I guess). I used to set it up each year on a card table in a small box filled with sand and kitty litter to synthesize the Israeli soil. The Currier & Ives like village took much longer to insert tab A into slot B for all the houses and such, but was prettier- I’d put it on another card table that I’d lined with cotton balls. I cut my own baby Christmas tree each year for my bedroom and displaced furniture for those cut out arrangements and I’d drape tinsel and hang icicles, etc… And yet I’ve never once so much as hung a wreath on my door since I’ve had my own place. Hmmm.
Every year we received a paper bag of peanuts, apples, oranges, and some candy from the Elks Club after the Christmas program at school. All the kids in the town got these bags, so it was a very large and generous gift. There were one to two thousand kids. Downtown Main Street was almost to crowded to walk it’s three main blocks. Decorations were on every lamp pole. A wire was stretched in an X over the main intersections, and garlands hung, with a decoration in the middle. The town was wired for sound, and speakers played Christmas music for three blocks. The jeweler sold watches and your parents bought you one as a rite of passage into responsible childhood. I got a Timex watch with a crystal in the back. You could watch all the gears, and mechanisms move. They still had those mechanical displays, to show off the jewelry, and get the kids to watch. The kids stop and the parents have to wait. Our Parochial School had grades k – 8, and we all had recess at the same time. We would have snowman making contests that strip the school yard bare of snow. Once we dared every class to roll the biggest snowball they could. The eighth graders all lifted the balls on top of each other to make a snowman about 12 to fifteen feet high. The principal called out the newspaper to get a picture. We all got to brag about the snowman the next day when the picture ran. The city piled their on our playground in years with huge amounts of snow. We played King of the Hill and made snow slides on the mountains of snow. We carved snow forts and snow palaces from the piles. The snow was from the entire city, so the amount of snow was astronomical. Once a warmer day came along the snow slides turned into ice slides, and you went down slick as shit. The sledding hill is a glacial kettle and every kid in town used this one circular depression. It’s about two city blocks wide in diameter. Every kid had to use the wood trails at some point. The runner sleds proved their worth or lack of on these trails. A good runner sled was flexible enough to steer and change coarse on a dime. The best ones were passed on father to son, can you say Radio Flyer all loosened up and broke in. You pulled the runners over sand before the season started to remove the rust, and waxed the runners before going sledding. Some kid broke his leg one year when he missed a turn and hit the large tree instead. That was a couple hour delay for us kids to use the wood trails again. Some kid got the broken runner in the leg when I was there. Charles Hibner decorated his spruce tree for over 40 years. It was always a big tree and his tree was everyone’s destination for light viewing. Our Cub Scout Troop sang Christmas carols around the neighborhood, and had hot chocolate and cookies afterwards. Hot chocolate wasn’t available in a mix form. You put it in the large stainless steel pan and brought it to a simmer not a boil or it’s ruined. You stirred in PDQ chocolate mix or Quick. Great Grandma would use cocoa powder and table sugar, or semi-sweet baking chocolate and table sugar. Everyone got two or three large marshmallows in the cup, before the hot chocolate was poured in. They didn’t melt if you waited to put them in. Great Grandma’s pans were all aluminum and wore out. They all had holes that were plugged with a washer and bolt. She patched all our families socks, and you had a big lump where your toe should go. Every neighborhood had a small grocery store within walking distance. We had a lot of snow in the early 70’s and the open rural areas were plentiful. All the families in the country side owned snowmobiles. The trails went through fields and woods you can only dream about today. The main highways were closed for about 36 hours one year, and anybody that needed supplies from the stores could drive down any of the roads that storm. I have a picture of the highway in the middle of the day and no tire tracks in it. We got a lot of relatives at my house when ice storms killed the power for days. My parents had a propane stove and the furnace was a gravity feed oil burner. No power meant no fan, but it worked without the fan also. I would haul ass out to my cousins farm for ice storms. They had a wood burning pot belly stove, and we cleaned off their shallow pond and skated all day. Those giant hills on the farms were great to toboggan down. It took 30 minutes to walk to the top, and the ride down was a good mile long. The worst thing was to get to the top or close and let the toboggan slip away. Nooooooooooooooo!
Ok, we celebrated Hannukah so this is a Hannukah memory, but we each had our own Hannukiah (the correct name for what most people call a menorah). I had a tiny one that took birthday candles. Anyways, the day before the first night of Hannukah we would bust them out and clean all of last year’s wax off of them, spiff them up, and put tin foil over the radiator (the only safe place to put them where they could show in the window.) I’m sure the excitment levels didn’t compare to Christmas Eve but it was fun thinking that Hannukah was going to start the next day.
Another family tradition is that seriously, we never owned more than one pair of scissors and one roll of tape my entire childhood. And we’re all procrastinators, so after dinner everyone would race down, trying to be the first to get the scissors, and then “secretly” wrap that night’s presents. Sometimes we used staples, or glue sticks, duct tape or just lengths of ribbons to secure the wrapping if we got impatient waiting for the Scotch tape. So half-assed wrapping jobs were a big part of Hannukah growing up. To this day if the wrapping job is too neat and tidy it takes something away from the present 
take that, Martha Stewart.