Welcome everyone to Christmas Memories Vol. 1! We hope that you're having a great time thus far in the season, no matter what you celebrate. Since we're in December, which will absolutely fly by as it always does, I'd like to spout a little Christmas joy from my own personal childhood experience. It can be a lot of fun taking a trip down memory lane around the holidays and venture into what made them exciting.

One big big BIG item I'll always cherish in the ol' brain stew is this monstrosity of a homemade Christmas VHS tape my family made. I swear this thing was at least 4 hours long and it had everything! The lineup went something like How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Christmas Comes to Pac Land, The Smurf’s Christmas Special, A Flintstones Christmas, The Elf and the Magic Key, The Town Santa Forgot, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, Mickeys Christmas Carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas, Donald's Snow Fight, Pluto’s Christmas Tree, A Muppet Family Christmas and Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas Celebration. See? I told you; it had damn near everything you could ever imagine needing as a child in the early 90s. The label on the side was completely scribbled full of tiny penned in movie title's that just barely fit.

I watched this thing often, even out of season sometimes but, when the time finally snuck around where I'd no longer have judgement cast on me for putting that tape in, it practically never left the vcr. Let me put you in the scene: days before Christmas, 6 years old, it's snowing like it had never snowed before. All the siblings gather in after a cold day of being dragged around on sleds by a fourwheeler. Snow suits turn to sweat suits; mugs of steaming hot chocolate waiting on the counter top. Nothing but the luminous glow of the Christmas tree and the TV. That fucking tape was the absolute thickest layer of icing atop this gargantuan Christmas cake! The best part of all, we made sure we got all the Christmas commercials to go with it. Commercials like the classic Hershey Kiss Bells, a couple "Spots" chiseling ice into a glass of 7up, the Campbell’s Soup snowman kid, creepy Bill Cosby and his Jello Jiggler gang of kids, the Long John Silvers popcorn fish, the Coca-Cola polar bears sharing a bottle of cola... all the good stuff. And not just Christmas stuff, some of the hottest games and toys also made the cut such as Simon, Crossfire, the Powerwheels Kawasaki Ninja.... even Batman action figures made it in there!

Unfortunately, I don't have said tape any longer. Between moving a few times and updating our VHS collection to DVDs, the tape has been lost in personal item limbo for years now surely next to missing appendages of old toys and my old Ghostbusters lunchbox in the depths of some Goodwill. I have tried many times to recreate this tape via YouTube playlist however, it quickly proved very difficult to keep up with once these titles deemed "for kids" started to either disappear or were unable to be saved or shared. But, I have them all listed here, feel free to check as many of them out as you can; most of them are on youtube still. Think of it as the ultimate Christmas challenge to jam each one of the above items in before the season is over.

I want to thank you all for reading this little tidbit from my brain files! Plenty more where this one came from that I can share at a later time (maybe even this month). Feel free to share with us your favorite Christmas memories!