The Seventies was a great decade for toys and looking back I did very well every year, writes Sarah Newton.
A space hopper? Check. A Girl’s World? Yep. Tiny Tears? Had one. Sindy? Barbie? Pippa Doll? All of the above.
But my greatest Christmas present of all time? A pair of metal, adjustable roller skates that strapped straight onto your shoes like some kind of medieval torture device disguised as childhood fun.
Each skate had two leather straps (one always slightly too short) and a metal frame that turned your feet into instant weapons. If you got a bit overexcited, you’d earn a neat two-inch cut on your ankle as a souvenir.
Honestly, I’ve no idea how these things were legal. I’m fairly sure they were designed by someone who strongly disliked children! And performance-wise? Definitely not their strong point.
On Tarmac (the only surface available to most children) they were utterly useless. Roll a potato across a gravel path and you’d get smoother movement. The wheels behaved like a supermarket trolley with one sabotaged wheel – the kind they booby-trap so you can’t push it out of the car park.
Every time I pushed off, they jammed, wobbled or spun in entirely the wrong direction, sending one foot veering off and gently, but relentlessly, easing me into an accidental set of splits.
But none of that mattered. Because that Christmas morning, when I strapped them over my school shoes (RIP), I felt like a champion. I felt unstoppable. I felt… like I was about to fall flat on my face.
And I did. Repeatedly. But it didn’t matter – I had the wind in my hair, I looked as cool as Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu (ask your mum) and I was one step nearer to my dream of being the next Jayne Torvill.
And that’s the beauty of childhood. You don’t realise how terrible something is until years later, when you look back and realise how rubbish they were.
Still, those metal skates gave me my first true understanding of the phrase “character building.”
They were noisy, clunky, slightly vicious and completely mine. And I absolutely loved them.
Even if the Tarmac didn’t.
It’s fair to say that Big Trak has been lost in among the very many toys that have come and gone over the years, but for a short time at the start of the 1980s it was at the cutting edge of technological advancement, writes Simon Burch.
Resembling a futuristic sci-fi tank, it was a plastic six-wheeled tank with a photon beam headlamp mounted on the front and a keyboard on the top.
And it was the keyboard which held the key to its appeal, because you could use it to programme in a series of commands, which Big Trak would then carry out, such as turn left, turn right, or pause.
I say “you”, when I mean not me. Because despite what now seems like many hours staring at Big Trak in the pages of the Argos catalogue and imagining how cool it would be to operate, I never owned one.
They really did look amazing. And for a few years, Christmasses would come and go without a Big Trak. There would be a Matchbox plastic car raceway, or a programmable Simon, or whatever toy my parents/Santa felt I deserved that year.
But no Big Trak.
You might expect at this point for me to lament how my parents were ignoring their favourite (i.e. only) son, leaving me feel ignored and unlistened-to Christmas after Christmas.
But that wasn’t it. Because even though I really wanted a Big Trak, I don’t think I ever actually asked for one. So all the longing, the hoping, the desire was essentially self-inflicted, because I never spoke up.
Likewise, I never asked for a Millennium Falcon, either – another toy I would have loved to have owned, but which stayed out of reach, largely because I never told anyone I actually wanted one.
Which makes a story about longing for a toy I never got a bit lame, and perhaps tells a bigger story – that I’m lucky enough to have grown up as a child who may have wanted stuff, but never felt that they ever really missed out.
Which papers over the hurt of never having had a Big Trak of my own to boss around, or turn left, or right.
And as it happens, a few years later when I visited some friends of my parents, I noticed their son actually did have a Big Trak, and he told me that the toy – the iconic, high-tech programmable, apple-of-my-eye sci-fi tank I’d dreamt of for so long – was actually quite boring, and in fact, a bit rubbish.
Thinking about it now, I’ve always been a shopper. I didn’t realise it at the time, of course, but when I think back to Christmas gifts, I can see exactly where the problem started, writes Sarah-Louise Elton.
I had a best friend throughout my entire school life — also a Sarah. She was big Sarah and I was little Sarah.
One year, when we were about twelve, she started gloating and teasing about the Christmas gift she’d got me. She kept going on and on about it, saying it was “worth millions,” that it was “one of my absolute favourite things,” and dropping hints that only made it worse. According to her, it was shiny, life-changing, and something I “wouldn’t be able to stop looking at.” I had no idea what it could be.
Eventually, the mystery gift appeared under our tree. My mum was in on the joke, of course — refusing to let me touch it. I remember staring at it for days, absolutely desperate to work out what was inside. It was about the size of a shoebox, maybe a bit smaller — the kind of size that could’ve been anything.
Christmas morning finally came, and I was more excited about that one present than anything else. After all the teasing, the build-up, the guessing… I ripped off the paper and there it was:
My very first catalogue.
And honestly….she was right. I absolutely loved it.
I’d spent hours at big Sarah’s house flipping through hers — swiping through the glossy pages, imagining myself wearing the black dress I would never get, dripping in the gold from the jewellery section, or strutting around with the beauty case on wheels filled with all my (imaginary) catalogue-bought makeup. And now I could do whenever I wanted.
So yes… thinking about it now, that was the moment the shopper in me was born. And it all started with a shoebox-sized surprise, a very excited best friend and my first ever catalogue.
Christmas 2006 will forever stand out as one of the most magical festive seasons of my childhood, largely because it marked the release of one of the most iconic consoles of all time, the Nintendo Wii, writes Danielle Williams.
I remember the television adverts vividly, families grouped in their living rooms, swinging imaginary bowling balls, hitting home runs, and collapsing into laughter over Wii Sports. To my young mind, the idea of playing a full game of tennis with my family from the comfort of our own living room was astonishing.
Even now, in a world with virtual reality headsets like the Meta Quest, the Wii feels timeless. It wasn’t just a console, it was a shared experience, something modern online games, for all their advancements, struggle to replicate.
The Wii quickly became the must-have gift of the year. It felt like every child, and every adult, was desperate to get their hands on one.
It dominated playground talk, sparked frantic shopping attempts, and was so sought-after that newspapers printed restock announcements like weather forecasts. I remember reading them, excitement and doubt mingling in my chest, wondering if even Santa could manage to get hold of one.
When Christmas morning finally arrived, my sister and I bolted downstairs, greeted by heaps of gifts beneath the tree. We tore through wrapping paper, riding that pure Christmas high known only to children.
But when the excitement settled, something was missing. No white box. No Wii. When my parents asked if we were happy, we smiled and insisted that we were, and we meant it.
We were grateful, even if the console we dreamed of hadn’t appeared. We began tidying up scraps of wrapping paper when my dad suddenly re-emerged, carrying one last present: a large box labelled simply, From Santa.
Inside was the elusive Wii.
That console became the most used electronic device in our home. We bowled, danced, competed in tennis, my granddad even swung the remote so hard he nearly broke the TV.
It wasn’t just a gift; it became a core memory. To this day, the Nintendo Wii remains the greatest present I ever received.
Isn’t it strange how some feelings resonate down the years? writes Lucy Stephens.
I was five years old when I realised how badly I wanted a Dial a Design.
I can vividly remember the sense of longing. And 1981 is a long time ago.
How the Dial a Design seeped into my consciousness at such a tender consumer age, I’m not sure.
I think someone must have come to school bragging about their new toy on which you could create a wide range of gorgeous geometric designs.
It was bright blue and yellow.
As the name suggests, it featured a funky mechanism on which the user – having carefully cut out a circle of paper to the required size (I always struggled with that bit) – could joyfully ‘dial’ through the numbers, tracing round a pre-inserted shape every time, to produce what (I felt) was a simply magical spirograph.
I went home and told my mum how much I wanted one.
That stratagem certainly didn’t always result in my getting what I wanted.
This time though my mum was in favour and off we went to Argos.
Perhaps that’s why I remember this whole thing so clearly. I’m pretty sure we’d never been to Argos before. A nice man had to explain to us how the catalogue system worked, how you ordered your toy, paid for it and then collected it when your number came up on the big screen.
Anyway, next thing I know, I’ve got my very own Dial a Design!
The excitement. The buzz. Carefully taking out the plastic discs in the back to create new designs every time.
The realisation you could make something look even more amaaaazing by alternating different coloured felt tips per shape.
The slight sense of panic when, half way through a spirograph, you realised your felt tip might run out before you reached the end.
This definitely wasn’t a case of reality not matching the original desire.
The Dial a Design was just as much fun as I thought it would be.
It still is. I’ve kept it to this day.
