on the third day of christmas

I pondered Christmases past.

I remembered a year when all I wanted for Christmas was a Bigtrak. My parents tried to persuade me that I really wanted something else, but I couldn’t be shifted. So on the weekend before Christmas my father drove all over, looking for a Bigtrak for me. He found one, at Oldham iirc, which was a good few miles from where we lived, and he did all that so that on Christmas morning, I would have the thing I wanted most.

The Bigtrak was a disappointment. It didn’t do the things that it did on the advert – the hydraulics in the trailer weren’t strong enough to roll an apple in to you hand. But it isn’t the disappointment I remember, it’s the fact that my parents went those miles to get the present I wanted. I remember that clearly now, *cough* some decades on.

(And incidentally, the present they’d got that they thought I would want turned out to be what set me on my path to geekhood – it was a ZX81. Wish that would come back out in the shops today!)

I wonder what my children will remember. I hope they will remember that I cared, that I did my best, and that sometimes at least, they got what they wanted.