What is an important item from your childhood, and where is it now....

    As Christmas is approaching quickly, and having turned 40 years of age this year, I was thinking that I have had 39 Christmas days, with the 40th happening in two weeks. I think back on all of the things I have received for Christmas, and what it would look like with every Christmas present I ever received was all in the living room on Christmas morning. 

   

    As I think back on all of the great memories and times spent with family, there are some presents that stand out the most in my memory. One was my first guitar, which I got when I was 14, almost 15, years old, and I still have it in my parent's unfinished basement, that is used for storage. I haven't played that guitar in years, but it's the one I first had, and spent hours upon hours teaching myself how to play. A couple years later, I got an electric guitar, and two years after that, I got a guitar pedal effects board so I could play different songs with different sounds. I now have a beautiful acoustic electric guitar and a hollow body electric guitar I got for Christmas two years ago. Every guitar I have dates back to a Christmas day. 

    The topic is supposed to be an important item from my childhood, and the guitars came when I was a teenager, so if I had to name something from my childhood, it would be my original Nintendo Entertainment System, that I got for Christmas in 1986. It came with three games. The original Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, (The system came with a video game gun), and Track and Field (The system also came with the "Power Pad"). In the Track and Field game, you would step onto the pad, which had 12 spots to step on, and you would run in place, and your character would race, or do the long jump, where you ran in place as fast as you could, and then jump at the line, and then come back down. 

    I spent a lot of my childhood playing video games on that System. We actually had an Atari that my dad bought before I was born, but he sold it to our neighbors, and then bought a Colecovision, which was Atari's biggest rival. When we got the Nintendo, my dad gave the Colecovision to some other neighbors, now that we had the Nintendo. I actually found a Colecovision system and a ton of games on eBay back in 2002, and I still have it, and even play with it often. The Colecovision was, in my opinion, better than the Atari. It had better games, and it was the precursor to Nintendo, and it was the first home video game system to have the original Donkey Kong. We had that, a fun Smurf's game, and my personal favorite, Mouse Trap. There is a video game world records website called Twin Galaxies, where you have to film yourself playing a game on the original system, not an emulator and Roms to play on your computer. I have the world record for the high score for Mouse Trap. I know it's something basically not very people know about, but it still counts. 

    In Mouse Trap, you were a mouse, well, just the head, and it kind of looked like Mickey Mouse, and the mouse was in a maze, a lot like Pac-Man, but you were eating cheese instead of dots, and instead of power pellets, you would eat a red bone, and instead of ghosts, there were cats, and when you collect a bone, you can store it, and when a cat is ready to kill you, you push a button, and you turn into a dog that eats the cat. The other thing that is great about the game is there are pieces of the wall that are red, yellow and blue, and you could change the maze and trap the cats, or change the wall for a fast escape.

    I could go on about the Colecovision, but the real item from my childhood that I loved most was the original Nintendo. As a matter of fact, my dad and I were getting some decorations for Christmas, and I looked in a box and found it. The Nintendo I got in 1986, and most of the games and controllers were with it. I have to admit, I have emulators and Roms on my computer for every single Nintendo game ever created. They are easy to find and download, although, they are free, they have been on the internet to download almost everywhere you search, but lately, Nintendo is trying to crack down on that, since they are releasing old school games on the Switch, so some of the websites are no longer active. However, there is something about taking an old toy, the original toy, or video game system, and playing it and experiencing it again, and also by sharing it with my son, Elliot, and my nephew and nieces. Elliot likes the Colecovision a little bit better, and it makes me proud to have a kid who appreciates old technology, and to see how far things have come since then. 

    So, that's my prompt and stories. I do have to mention, I remember people saying that video games will rot your brain. It's not true. In fact, people that played the original Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog, have been tested, and all of the people tested that played those games when they were younger, as opposed to those who didn't, actually have a better memory and finer motor skills. There are a lot of great articles online about all of the good things video games have given us. However, there is a time limit, and people shouldn't be playing all day, every day, that just messes up your social skills, and there are other things more important than video games that should be done before playing, like homework. In fact, there are hundreds of video games out there that require strategy, memory, problem solving skills and even Nintendo has tons of games that teach you math, science, history, programming, and even a little engineering. So, video games, in moderation are actually good for your brain. 

    Well, that's all I have for now. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed telling you all about it. You can leave comments below and tell me your favorite childhood item, and where it is now. So long for now!