Dino Drac’s Countdown to Xmas!
Welcome to Dino Drac’s Countdown to Christmas! This is a multipage feature. Links to all of the pages are at the bottom, or you can click here to visit the first page with the most recent entries.
11/23: Christmas Blow Molds! (1980s)
These plastic blow molds were everywhere in the ‘80s. Everywhere except our front lawn. For whatever reason, my family – good Catholics and very much Christmas people – never partook.
My best friend’s family did, though. They lived right across the street, and every December, I’d alternate between delight and jealous rage when they set up that army of giant illuminated figures, outclassing our basic ass lights by every metric.
Actually, some of my favorite memories of their blow molds have nothing to do with Christmas. During the offseason, all of those plastic people lived in their shed. Throughout the year, we always seemed to come up with reasons to drag them out.
I remember me, my friend and his brothers arranging them into obstacle courses to ride our bikes around, for games that were probably inspired by Double Dare. More creatively, we sometimes used them as fake spectators for our wannabe wrestling matches, because who wants to drop an elbow onto wet grass without an audience?
Whatever we used them for, we were ALWAYS sure to put the blow molds back in the shed before their father got home. He was a good guy, but trust me, even if he couldn’t properly articulate why, the sight of us doing anything with those blow molds would’ve gotten my friend, his brothers, and possibly even me killed on the spot.
11/22: Consumers Catalog Page! (1991)
‘Tis the season for old department store catalogs! From the Sears Wish Book to JCPenney’s equally-thick slabs, they’ve been a part of my holiday tradition for as long as I’ve been alive.
As a child, some of my favorite Christmassy catalogs came from Consumers Distributing, a high-concept chain that worked more like a restaurant than, say, a Target. You’d go in, fill out order forms, and then wait twenty minutes for someone to tell you that nothing you wanted was in stock. But that’s neither here nor there. Their catalogs were fantastic.
This page from their 1991 catalog seemed particularly share-worthy. I haven’t mentioned Bucky O’Hare often, but I collected the hell out of those action figures, in part because they were scaled to seamlessly mingle with all of my Ninja Turtles.
Swamp Thing was another big one… not so much out of any special reverence for the character, but because Kay-Bee Toys almost always had the toys on clearance. Often enough, getting two figures from something you kinda liked was better than getting one from something you loved.
And wait, what’s that? OOZERS?! Well, I’ll be! That means this catalog was actually from Canada, where Consumers had a much bigger presence. The Oozers collection was never available in the States, and the figures now fetch insanely high prices. (You may remember one turning up during the Mausoleum of Madness.)
This won’t be the last time a Christmas catalog turns up here, so if you’re into that sort of thing, hang tight. For now, I hope this helped you remember the era when circling toys in 500-page retail tomes was our quickest avenue to pure bliss.
11/21: Rice Krispies Merry Treats! (1970s)
This magazine ad from the ‘70s just makes me happy, and I hope it does the same for you. It might not, of course, given that I posted it on Facebook earlier, and it performed so badly that I quietly deleted it. That’s why it’s good to have my own site, where I’m free to be Martha Stewart without shame.
Doing Christmassy stuff with Rice Krispies Treats is still a thing today, even if some of these ideas are uniquely ‘70s. I’m particularly drawn to that weird nest filled with an obscene amount of green pudding. It looks like something out of Troll 2.
I appreciate how they didn’t get too pro-looking with the decorative touches. I feel like I could actually make these, you know? Hell, I bet I could do an even better job frosting that duck wing. Tbh, most people could.
11/20: McD’s Reindeer Ornaments! (1985)
McDonald’s ran many great holiday promos in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and while most have been covered to death in the online nostalgia circuit, I feel like nobody ever talks about these adorable reindeer!
Back in 1985, you could get a plush reindeer ornament based on Santa Claus: The Movie, free with a book of McDonald’s gift certificates. That was the chain’s usual “catch” with their various plushie ornaments, which were really too good to shove in Happy Meal boxes… but totally worth the expense if McD’s got you to blow money on coupons that most people never redeemed, anyway.
Nobody should be surprised by this team-up, since Santa Claus: The Movie featured some of the most egregious McD’s product placement this side of Mac & Me. Hell, this wasn’t even their only promotion tied to the film. McDonald’s also did a traditional Happy Meal, with little storybooks as the prizes.
The reindeer ornaments are ridiculously cute, and on the collectors’ market, they’re no more expensive than what you’d pay for a similar doll made in 2025. (Faint praise, I know.) And it’s not like you have to be some big fan of the movie to want one. They’re just reindeer! Nobody’s gonna tie them to Dudley Moore if you don’t tell them!
11/19: Ewok Adventure Magazine Ad! (1984)
Star Wars is very much a “holiday season” thing for me, for a variety of reasons seeded through the decades.
Some of my favorite childhood Christmas presents came from Kenner’s action figure collection. Then there’s The Empire Strikes Back and its snowy first half, which never feels inappropriate under the glow of string lights. And of course, there’s the fact that every chapter in the sequel trilogy was released in December.
Somewhere on that list is The Ewok Adventure, the made-for-television movie that premiered on ABC on November 25th, 1984. That was three days after Thanksgiving, and though I was just five years old, I absolutely remember watching it that night. (On our modest living room television, which I’d previously half-ruined because nobody told me that you shouldn’t put refrigerator magnets on a TV set.)
To me, The Ewok Adventure felt as big as any of the “real” Star Wars movies. I loved seeing how the Ewoks lived, I loved Burl Ives’s documentary-style narration, and I loved watching everyone fight a kaiju demon pirate. Through adult eyes, I can also admit that it’s very slow, often cheesy, and perhaps best served on a rainy afternoon when you’re trapped on the couch with an incapacitating flu.
Whenever I’m reminded of that film, I picture myself as a kid in the old living room, paging through the Sears Wish Book during the commercial breaks, plowing through a sleeve of Saltines. The tree wasn’t up yet, but it soon would be, and the holiday vibes were most definitely in the air.
