‘As a child you are mostly powerless, but a letter to Father Christmas is a tangible list of things you believe would make your life better’



Emine Saner on Mr Frosty

I have long believed that you can split adults of a certain generation into two groups: those who got a Mr Frosty for Christmas, and those who did not. You can tell the ones who did – they have sailed through life on a wave of entitlement, confident their desires deserve to be met, secure in their parents’ love/Father Christmas’s approval. They think nothing of asking for a pay rise or taking up seats on public transport. The ones who were deprived of this plastic snowman – into whose head you put ice cubes, to be crushed and drenched in flavoured syrup from a plastic penguin – tend to be less sure of their place in the world, less sure their demands will be met.

It is an unscientific observation, but I believe the Mr Frosty test has become a law of nature since its launch in 1980.

I did not get a Mr Frosty. Most didn’t – it has become the cliche, the archetype, of the Christmas present that got away, according to threads on message boards and a quick poll of friends. So I am not alone in this childhood wrong.

For me, it was partly a cost issue – our family lived on benefits and at £9.95, as it was then, Mr Frosty would have been main-present territory, not additional frippery. (My mum knew it would have been a rubbish main present, but the point of a Christmas list is to go against everything your parents know.) But I think my overblown feelings about this minor deprivation are down to something else. As a child you are mostly powerless, but a letter to Father Christmas is a tangible list of things you believe would make your life better, and it feels as if you might just be heard. But, as ever, your parents are really in control. And unlike me, my mother was not in thrall to peer pressure, adverts, plastic tat or E-numbers. So, despite having a Mr Frosty at the top of my list every year, it was hopeless. (She was right, of course – I would have used it a couple of times, and it would still be decaying in some landfill site in the Midlands.)

And yet. When Mr Frosty arrives, I feel more excited than I should. It’s not exactly how I imagined – I suspect health and safety has done away with the former angle grinders contained within 80s Mr Frosties (as I imagine), and replaced them with something less brutal, and therefore less efficient. There is no luminous syrup, as there was back then, so I have to hunt around for something that will work and – perhaps the very emblem of economic mobility, this – end up juicing a pomegranate. My childhood disappointment has melted with every scoop of flavoured ice-shavings and I feel emboldened by a new wave of entitlement and can’t-fail optimism. I’m planning to set up a hipster bar where everyone serves themselves from a Mr Frosty. It will change lives.

Clearly if not getting a Mr Frosty – or a Millennium Falcon, or a Super Soaker, or a Cabbage Patch doll – was the worst thing that happened during your childhood, you have much to be thankful for, including a valuable life lesson that most us of do not get everything we want. Still, as these writers show, that doesn’t stop us carrying a tiny chip of bitterness decades later.

‘This was a gender-rigid time – boys did not play at cooking’

Rhik Samadder on a pink plastic toy oven

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rhik Samadder with a mini kitchen. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

She was a play kitchen, in pink plastic, with little plastic cutlery and plates. Child-sized, but large enough to demand respect. She stood in the glass of a shop adjacent to Lewisham fish market, a thing of domestic perfection among the mackerel heads. I don’t remember the name of the shop; only that thrillingly hinged oven door, and the cupcakes placed inside. This was during my Mrs Dalloway phase, around the age of six.

I don’t know why my parents never bought it for me. I suspect it might have had something to do with being unable to afford it, but for the purposes of politicising Christmas, let’s say it was because of patriarchy. This was a gender-rigid time, when boys did not play at cooking, especially with pink ovens aimed at girls. And so, we could never be together. In a sense, I have spent my adult life trying to get back to her; I am now a reviewer of kitchen gadgets, with days spent putting toys in the oven, albeit a (slightly) bigger one.

I don’t know what we call the generation below the generation below millennials, but they have it good. You can get hardwood and metal play kitchens now, that resemble Agas, or ones with a sink, hobs and attached fridge-freezers, which makes no sense, but still. It is too late for me. The sleek modern versions are still too expensive, and I am not sure they fit the bill. I want the little pink one, with the cupcakes.

The verdict: It is a lot smaller than I remember. What kind of devil-child dreams of an electric hob to play with? Also, the food items don’t make sense – the roast chicken is exactly the same size as a single chip, and both are smaller than the lettuce leaf. Where are the cupcakes? I’m not even sure this is the same item. I feel quite confused and angry, to be honest.

‘The girls in my class started comparing who was born prematurely and who wasn’t’

Hadley Freeman on the Cabbage Patch Preemie

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hadley Freeman with a Cabbage Patch Kid Preemie. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

Cabbage Patch Kids were, very possibly, the weirdest kid craze in the history of kid crazes. Not least because, with their scrunched up faces, they looked a lot less like kids and more like actual cabbages. But the weirdest thing about them, even weirder than the fact each of them had the signature of their creator, Xavier Roberts, on their backside, is that the babies were called Preemies. Yes, as in “premature”. Because your run-of-the-mill newborn just ain’t cute enough unless it’s born at least five weeks early. When the Preemie craze hit my school, the girls in my class started comparing who was born prematurely and who wasn’t and, God forgive me, I felt an actual twinge of envy when I found out my best friend was a real life preemie. I, on the other hand, had been two weeks overdue and with a head so large my poor mother had to have an emergency C-section. Ugh, gross, big-headed, full-term me! So shaming. So perhaps my parents denied me the Preemie because they cannily sensed how susceptible I already was to societal pressures about size. I really take my infant cap off to Xavier Roberts for encouraging me to feel retrospectively too big as a newborn. Don’t even talk to me about Barbies, I honestly suspect all my problems began with the Preemies.

The verdict: Ahh the Cabbage Patch Preemie: not my Rosebud exactly, as I never owned it in the first place, so let’s call it my Moby Dick. And after a lifetime’s pursuit, actually holding one in my arms is an emotional experience. Emotional, because, my God, the thing is ugly. This strange potato-faced doll was the object of all my childhood dreams and wishes? Conclusion: I was a weird child.

‘Why I wanted to waste my childhood tending to a malevolent anti-feminist decapitated head is beyond me’

Chitra Ramaswamy on the Make Me Pretty Barbie Styling Head

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chitra Ramaswamy with a Make Me Pretty Barbie Styling Head. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

It was a giant, blonde, white, creepy Barbie head on a cheap plastic plinth. I was a small brown girl trapped in the late-80s (when it was deeply uncool to be a small brown girl), with an unquenchable desire to comb her hair with a tiny pink brush. Did I get a Make Me Pretty Barbie Styling Head for Christmas? Of course not. I probably got another Pound Puppy, which in retrospect was a great deal healthier for my sense of self. And style.

Still, at the time I wanted one bad. This was the era of Tiny Tears (a doll who urinated out of her right hip joint when you poked her in the belly) and Strawberry Shortcake (a doll who did nothing but smell vaguely of a scratch ’n’ sniff strawberry sticker). The messages for girls were not great. Giant Barbie head encapsulated everything about Barbie that was wrong, writ larger. And creepier. Her sole purpose in life was to be “made pretty”. For me it was all about the hair, which sprouted in synthetic golden tufts from her hard pink head and, in my possibly unreliable memory, grew like real human hair. Why I wanted to waste my childhood tending to a malevolent, anti-feminist decapitated head is beyond me, especially as I have since grown into an adult who doesn’t even own a hairbrush.

In the end my sister got one and I have spiky memories of her playing with it with her best friend, scribbling blue felt tip over her big empty eyes and fastening pink plastic jewellery round her neck. Eventually, someone gave her a buzz cut. Meanwhile I lurked in the shadows feeding imaginary Pedigree Chum to my Pound Puppies and cultivating my deep love of dogs. Basically, it all worked out in the end.

The verdict …

This is wrong, on every level. First – and this probably shouldn’t be first – the size of Dreamtopia Barbie Rainbow Styling Head’s head is way too small. Like Wham bars, she has shrunken to the point of pointlessness, though my partner points out this may be a case of perspective. As in, my 38-year-old head has grown too. Second, her hair is pink (no, no, no). Third, she deeply offends my politics, and the faux-woke gesture of “including” a smiling Asian girl on the box (a smaller, boxed-out “friend” to the white girl who, naturally, is the true owner of Dreamtopia Barbie) only makes it worse. I interact with this tiara’d fiend once for the sake of the photographer, after which my four-year-old son repeatedly rams fire engines into the box in an appalling re-enactment of the patriarchy.

Finally, in a Proustian moment I gaze into those vacant blue eyes and realise it was actually a Girl’s World my sister got for Christmas. Oops.

We asked Guardian readers which present they missed out on – and asked Santa if he could make up for his past intransigence

Collated by Rachel Obordo

Zoe Richards, 39, Edinburgh: Hungry Hungry Hippos

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zoe Richards and son with Hungry Hungry Hippos. Photograph: Handout

I really wanted Hungry Hungry Hippos and instead received Grabbin Dragons. My parents obviously thought the creatures were interchangeable. They were wrong.

The verdict There were some fraught moments trying to fit the hippos on to the base, even though they appear to have slimmed down somewhat since the 80s. When my soon-to-be four-year-old saw them, he said: “Oh, dragons.” Now I see where the confusion may have set in. To begin with, he was miffed as to how this could be mummy’s present and not his, but agreed to join me for a few exuberant rounds.

Katherine McQueen, 37, Bristol: Care Bear

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Katherine McQueen and her Care Bear. Photograph: Handout

In the mid-80s, aged five, I longed for a Care Bear. However, my mum was an anti-Thatcher 60s hippy, who saw them as grossly commercial. Instead, she re-fashioned one of my teddies by sewing a rainbow on his stomach. It never passed as a Care Bear, being half the size and with a totally different face shape, but saying that, I still have it now and it joins a host of soft toys at the bottom of my youngest’s bed.

The verdict Wow, it’s VERY pink and huge and … it giggles! Perhaps on this one, unique occasion, my mother was right! How am I going to complain to her about my childhood now? Since it arrived, my six-year-old boy has not let it leave his side. It seems no six-year-olds have taste.

Sarah Dalton, 52, London: Barbie

At the tender age of seven, I longed for a Barbie doll. I always had to go down the road to my best friend, Julie, who had not only the Barbie doll, but the bedroom set, the clothes and the horse. To a small child, this seemed the epitome of sophistication. I recently asked my mother about this, and she said she did not see the point in buying it as I spent so much time playing with my friend’s. I wanted my own Barbie!

The verdict Every year, I have reminded my mother of her shortcomings as a parent for failing to purchase the gift I coveted for so long. Her reasoning was that it is grotesque. Now, looking at the doll through adult’s eyes, I can see her point. However, it has brought happy childhood memories flooding back.