Christmas 2015

If you could use a pick-me-up this holiday season, gimme your money! (UNITED STATES ONLY. LIMITED QUANTITIES AVAILABLE!) Dino Drac’s November 2016 Funpack is available now! For the few newbies: I sell monthly Funpacks. Without them, there would be no Dino Drac! In return for your patrona

Christmas turned into a 96 hour party, and I am exhausted! The only proper penance is a month spent in a gym that doubles as a detox center. Instead I’ll just lie on the couch and subsist on those growing-oilier-by-the-day antipasto leftovers. Welcome to Dino Drac’s Christmas Fallout�

As I write this, Christmas Eve is mere hours away. I still have sooo many things left to do. Gotta wrap the presents. Gotta make a billion stuffed mushrooms. Gotta figure out if I have even one single outfit that doesn’t make me look like a gothic mechanic. Gotta finish that bottle of Fi

I wanted to sneak in one last catalog review before Santa makes his magic, so here I am, blithely ignoring the dozen Very Important Things that I must get done in the next 36 hours, all for you. This time, I’m pulling pages from the 1994 JCPenney Christmas catalog. I believe I would’ve

I must’ve handled more than 200 Christmas tree ornaments over the course of my childhood, but I only distinctly remember a select few. There was the candy cane that I made out of glitter and construction paper. Then the too-heavy Santa with the missing foot. And who would forget our 

It’s a Christmas miracle! The Purple Stuff Podcast has returned! For those who don’t follow me on Twitter, yeah, we decided to take it easy with the schedule this month, because December is riotously busy and something had to give. We didn’t want to miss our chance to do

I love all of the toy store circulars that come with newspapers during the holiday season, even if the present definition limits that to Toys “R” Us and individual pity pages from Target and Walmart. You know what we’re missing? Kay-Bee Toys! I’ve written about Kay-Bee (later KB) m

Below: Five cereal boxes from Christmases past. They’re all from my personal collection. I’ll thank you in advance for reading this, as it helps to justify why I have a personal collection of Christmassy cereal boxes. As always, you’re my silent enablers. My tongueless Iagos. Go

It’s time for another batch of Classic Christmas Commercials, featuring pizza and laundry detergent and Ronald McDonald. Three of these are from my collection; the remaining are from our pal Larry. May they fill your hearts with joy, and your brains with really old ad jingles. A Toys 

I’m back with another batch of this year’s hottest holiday junk food. If you missed the previous reasons to look like Santa, click here and here. Cracker Jack Holiday Sugar Cookie Popcorn! It took me over a month to find a bag, but it was worth the wait. I’m not a big Cracker Jack gu

When we think about “animated Christmas TV specials,” our minds drift to the likes of Charlie Brown, Frosty, Rudolph and yeah, even Garfield, because we’re never gonna let it go with that one. Of course, the wealth of Christmas cartoons runs so much deeper than that. In the early ‘

Hooray! It’s finally here! Dino Drac’s December 2015 Funpack is available now, and I think this one qualifies as a doozy! (Available in the United States only!) Do I need to do the spiel again? Okay! If you haven’t been watching the site too closely, I sell monthly Funpa

Hello! Tonight I’ll be tearing apart another old toy catalog for your enjoyment. This time, Montgomery Ward’s 1983 Christmas catalog is on the slab. We didn’t have Montgomery Ward stores around here, so my firsthand knowledge is limited to stray references in long-ended sitcoms. I wa

I love Christmas stockings. The way they look, the way they feel, the way they get filled up with tiny toys. The way they let me hammer nails into studless walls that could support nothing heavier than a 14” sock. They’re 100% great. During my earliest years, this was the one classic C

Oh, man. My buddy donated another of his treasured childhood videocassettes, and this one was killer. Among other things, it included the full broadcasts of A Charlie Brown Christmas and How The Grinch Stole Christmas, which aired back to back on December 11th, 1987. Nostalgia’s been my

Happy Thanksgiving! (You know, if you celebrate it.) Consider this a hangout thread. In the comments, feel free to share stories about how you’ll be spending the holiday. Did you make any special dishes? Are you doomed for any twelve hour drives? Gonna watch a big ass inflatable Power Ra

Ah, it’s that time of year again! Time to make funky appetizers from the 1960s! As longtime readers know, I’m obsessed with old cookbooks. Specifically, cookbooks from that weird stretch of years when every other recipe called for unflavored gelatin. This obsession hits a fever pitch d

Did you know that He-Man and She-Ra appeared at the 1985 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade? It’s true! And I’ll be showing you the proof! Just you wait! Masters of the Universe was on top of the world in 1985, so it made sense for He-Man to snag an appearance at the annual parade. Of c

Here's another batch of 2015's best holiday junk food, including Cheetos Sweetos, Snickers Trees and more good reasons to throw nutritional caution to the wind!

I think it’s safe to say that we’re in the holiday season now, right? Good. That means I can blather on about old Christmas commercials without those nagging doubts. Yes, it’s time for the glorious return of Classic Christmas Commercials, the series in which I celebrate batches of ol

The holiday season is here! If you don’t believe me, just stroll down the nearest junk food aisle. Everything either tastes like peppermint or is shaped like a bell. I love it. Below are five of my favorite holiday junk foods for the 2015 season. Or maybe they’re just the first five th

As confessed last year, I grew up loving the Christmas editions of Woman’s Day, which were collected by my mother and left to die in the same little-used cabinet that otherwise housed obsolete phone books and broken AC adapters. I’ll admit that this wasn’t something I bragged about a

Hello! Let’s discover treasure together! The 1990 JCPenney Christmas catalog didn’t pack quite the same punch as some of the other catalogs I’ve reviewed, but it’s still hundreds of pages of toys, peanut dispensers and cheap lingerie, and that’s more than enough for a review. For

Thanks to the tremendous response from our listeners, The Purple Stuff Podcast — originally conceived as a Halloween-only show — now continues on a weekly basis with no end in sight! This week, me and Jay from The Sexy Armpit cover a bunch of discontinued junk foods that weR

The Empire Strikes Back made its network television debut on November 22nd, 1987. Here are ten TV commercials that aired during that broadcast, covering everything from King Kuts to the USPS!