This is a repeat post from years past. I like to post it on Christmas Eve, a place to share our own best memories of Christmases past.
The Secret Sam was my favorite Christmas present as a child. I still have it, and I will keep it, or perhaps pass it on to a grandchild. Oh, how excited and hopeful I was the year I asked for my own Secret Sam. My mother told me it was a boy’s toy, but I was never a Barbie doll girl.
That was my spy year, my year of intrepid adventures around the neighborhood. It was one of my last Christmases as a child, I think, wanting toys and dreaming of adventures. Not too many years later, perhaps even the next one, my Christmas gifts would be stereos and albums, bell bottom jeans and paisley print turtlenecks.
Perhaps that is why the memory of it is such a treasure to me.
This year my grandchildren will be blessed with the breathless anticipation of what might be under the tree Christmas morning. They will be late to bed, too excited to sleep easily, and early to rise, rushing to the living room in all the excitement and wonder a child can have.
They are being taught the real reason for Christmas, and they will have opened the last flap on the Advent calendar the day before, they will place Jesus in the manger on Christmas morning, and some of them will have caught snippets of the Christmas story, perhaps even at Midnight Mass. They have a book here at my house that unfolds into the journey to Bethlehem, and all the figures are there to travel or meet Mary and Joseph along the way. We read stories, we sing songs, we watch videos.
I want to help nurture faith, hope, and love, generosity, joy, as well as create memories and enjoy the anticipation. I want to see Christmas through the eyes of happy children who see so clearly the joy, the promise, and the simpleness of it all.
Most of all, I want to share the feelings, the very same feelings of a child who exclaims “I love Jesus!” and means it with all their heart.
May your Christmas Eve be blessed with warmth and hope and family and stockings that will soon be full, a house filled with scents of the season, and the anticipation of the birth of our Savior.
I pray for those who can’t be home, especially our service men and women, all those who work to keep us safe and healthy, and those who just can’t be home with loved ones. I pray for those who are alone in the world, for children who won’t have a joyful and warm and safe Christmas.
I pray for the world to share the joy and peace of the season. God bless us every one.
Merry Christmas All!
And with childlike faith I know any of us can shout I love Jesus with great joy.
Peace in your hearts I pray.
Have a beautiful, blessed Christmas with your family, Menagerie. This story never gets old.
I had one of the secret Sam attachés. Never took a picture, though.
For the little FBI Agent in your family (flasher raincoat not included).
Sure, I loved that toy, too. But what did you think of THIS one?
1964 Vintage Deluxe Reading Jimmy TV Jet Console WORKING
https://www.ebay.com/itm/126204208069?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=6EFfQoj_Se6&sssrc=2047675&ssuid=vSmBMnQsTI2&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY
Vintage 1965 Topper Toys Secret Sam Attache Case Complete w/ Manual RARE Version
https://www.ebay.com/itm/374346642016?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=PTfkfuJlSCe&sssrc=2047675&ssuid=vSmBMnQsTI2&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY
DON’T BE SURPRISED if our parents had to pay the inflation-adjusted equivalent of that to buy our toys! My parents paid $23 for a walking dog called Gaylord in 1962. This is what it would be today in 2023 money: $232.31. I can’t even believe that would be possible!
Thanks for posting the date on Secret Sam. I remembered as 1967.
A friend of mine had a Secret Sam. I thought it was the coolest toy ever.
Beautiful message! Thank you Menagerie – and Merry Christmas!
The best Christmas present I received was a 50-caliber machine gun on a tripod, like the one I saw in “Back to Bataan.” I was about 6 or 7 years old, and this toy gun looked real and worked with batteries to light up a red flash in the end of the barrel. Christmas morning, I went out in the yard and tucked into the shrubs in front of our house, I shot up every car that went by. That was only topped a few years later by a BB gun. I never shot a real gun until many years later at Lackland, AFB in basic training. I hate to say it, but the worst present I got in those young years was a book. As an adult, I never became gun crazy and I have read many, many books. Currently trying to get through Les Misérables.
Ahh yes, the Gung Ho Commando Set from Marx
That would have been cool!
I was lucky enough that at age 11, I received a J,J Arms “action figure”(not a doll!)
He was a real person, and was way cooler than my friends expensive Action Jackson or GI Joe.
I had to sell a whole bunch of vegetable/flower seeds from an ad in one of my comic books, then I impatiently waited 5 LONG weeks to get my first daisy 30/30 in the mail.
I loved books. As a shy, introverted child who didn’t make friends well I lived my world in books.
I never heard of the Secret Sam – I would have been in college when it was popular and not an age of paying attention to toys.
The periscope accessory is beyond cool!
Merry Christmas, everyone.
Thank you for your prayers.
In 1963, shortly after President Kennedy was assassinated, my mom’s dad died — my grandfather. Six months later my dad’s mom died — my grandmother. Years earlier my family had moved from Wisconsin to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and with 5 young children the deaths and financial hardship of traveling to two funerals far away took its toll.
In their grief and stress my parents decided to move back north so we could be by our remaining grandparents and they could be by their remaining parents.
Within a year my next younger sister lost her hearing in a freak accident, one where she was not hurt, but would be profoundly deaf for the rest of her life (she’s 67 now and still deaf). Doctor’s bills and trips to Mayo to find the reason for her hearing loss showed nothing, but a lot of bills. A few months later my sister was attending the same hearing school she’d attended before losing her hearing, and the repo man would come and take all our furniture and our families one car — the car my dad needed to get to work.
It was 1967 and my dad was able to buy a car that ran for $50.
That Christmas our parents told their children there would be no money for presents. We were never high-rollers anyway, and we were little kids who said, ‘OK mommy. OK daddy.’
But once it got dark out on Christmas Eve my parents packed us five kids in that $50 car and took us on a long drive, purposely planning the route to go by all the big fancy houses festively decorated with bright lights, reindeer, Santas and elves.
The old car didn’t have the horsepower to keep the windows defrosted as we all put our faces up against them (long before seat belts being required!), so we were scrapping and wiping the winds as we went along in our own version of a ‘one horse open sleigh.’
It was a spectacular night, with bright lights breaking through the darkness. It was a spectacular night with our family being together.
Although that was not a gift I would have ever imagined asking for as a kid, it is the best Christmas gift my parents ever gave me.
Just beautiful 🥰🥰🥰
The best things in life aren’t things
Love requires no fancy wrapping paper
I remember when we kids all piled in to our old chevvy nomad all bundled up, and with homemade popcorn and Dad drove us all around to look at lights. Hubs and I still do that every night. It’s one simple pleasure that’s still free. Except for the gas.
You say it so well I cannot add or improve on it. Merry Christmas! May God keep us all in his safe watch.
The faith of a child. The magic of the season.
Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas to all
My first horse “Champ” was the best present, saddening him up on a snowy cold Christmas Day in Minnesota was the warmest feeling as a youngster.
saddling.
My first remembered Christmas I got a Wyatt Earp outfit–hat, jacket, pants but no gun. Next Christmas, it was the Paladin gun and holster set, replete with the Have Gun–Will Travel calling cards. All the secret agent stuff didn’t come out until much later. But then, it was too late. I was already a Pancho type guy–nothing secret about me:
“Wore his gun outside his pants, for all the honest world to see.”
Here’s a prayer that everyone here will enjoy a nice Christmas in whatever way that means to you. If you’re lonely I pray the Lord to help you find friends. He promised in His word to “set the solitary in families “. If you’re sick or hurt, may you experience His healing touch. If your heart is troubled by regret, take it to the cross, and may you find comfort in His love. God bless us every one.
Peace to you and joy in yours as we move thru the Christmas season.
Sundance, I like the way, and what, you write. From my first reading of The Conservative Treehouse I have suspected that you were a woman, not a man as most commenters indicate as they respond to your articles. Thank you for confirming my suspicions. I wish you and yours a Happy New Year. Thank you for all you have shared with your readers.
This article was written by Menagerie, not Sundance! 🙂
I got the Secret Sam toy for Christmas, one year in the 1960s. It was one of the best toys ever.
I want to say that it was 1967, but if anyone can say what year that toy was released, please chime in.
I lump the years 1965, 1966, and 1967 as my best/favorite years of my youth. I was just old enough to be aware, but not yet in the travails of Junior High School and puberty. The USA had not hit the peak of the “sick sixties” yet, and Indiana lagged a year or two behind the nation when it came to societal evolution.
I have a hairbrush that I got in that era in my stocking one Christmas that I have used daily since that time to this very day. I can never find one to replace it. It remains perfect, to me, and try as they might, my wife and kids cannot replace it with one that is as good. And they have tried, repeatedly.
Merry Christmas!
I wish I still had my Secret Sam briefcase. Definitely one of my favs from back in the day when life was so much simpler. It was right up there with my red sting ray bike with the big banana seat. Ahhhhhh….
“I pray for those who are alone in the world, for children who won’t have a joyful and warm and safe Christmas.” The most important thought and critical issue of all!