Merry Christmas You Filthy Animals

Aw, come back!  I didn't mean it!  You can't help being filthy, it's not your fault!

...alright, so I just saw Home Alone the other night.  I don't know why, but all the torture those crooks go through looks so much more painful now than it did when I was a kid.

I want to talk about the tree, though.  It kinda works with my last post about Grayskull, 'cause I always used the tree as a playset!  Either A) it was a giant tree for my toys, or B) it was imagined as a gigantic mountain.  One way or another, each year around Christmas was a special "episode" in my toy stories as they had a huge battle all over the tree.  Figures almost fell to their dooms, catching a branch at the last minute, the fight would go to the inner parts of the tree, and enemy robots would be thrown off left and right, to smash and explode along the ground. 

So naturally, though I don't use it as a playset anymore, I still cover the thing in toys!  The little hooks that hold the ornaments on are malleable, so I just wrap 'em around toys in different ways and hang up the 'ol childhood.

This first one I took ended up getting me on accident, as I zoomed in...

The wife and I did absolutely NOTHING that day, so thankfully you can't really see my unshowered, disheveled self very well.

And this one is sort of a toy; it's Duffy, from Disney World.  There's a whole story behind him, but the basic idea was that Duffy was made to be a sort of non-Mickey mascot for Disney World.  Didn't catch on in America the first time around (though Japan latched on right quick) but the second time Duffy seemed to be around to stay.  Which is good!  'Cause my wife and I love it and we have a pair of tiny ones that we bring on vacations and take pics of them in different places.

Then of course, you'll noticed the food items with eyes.  They're from a blind boxed series of keychains of....well, food with faces.  They're cute as hell.

And there's a Slime as well! 

The Spider-Men are a homage to what I was talking about earlier: many of my battles in the tree revolved around my ongoing superhero story that involved a group of superheros that were....well, whatever I had at the time.  Two staple characters were Spider-Man....and the black suited Spider-Man which I called Spidey.  Yeah, that's just his abbreviated name, but I didn't understand that when I was little. 

You see, I didn't get a lot of comics, but I knew about the different looks!  I also knew about Venom, so without the comic background, I was racking my brain trying to figure out who the black suited Spider-Man was.  I had ONE comic when I was younger (I would get a ton more as I got older) and there was an advertisement for a Spider-Man shirt with the man himself wearing the black suit.  He referred to himself as Spidey on the shirt, and BAM - my brain immediately assumed that he was a totally different Spider-Man called Spidey.  Me and my friend Ryan would play Spider-Man all the time, with me being Spider-Man and him being Spidey.

Yeah.  I'm sure you all understand what it means to be young.  SOOO...Spider-Man and Spidey were always staples in my toy stories, and they were front and center in the tree battles.  As such; they are always going to be somewhere on my tree.

I just can't believe they made a white Dr. Doom figure!  It's like they were just asking me to put Christmas Doom on the tree!  Not that I haven't put a Doom in the tree for a good while now, but the white one is now the official Christmas Tree Doom!  He's so festive!

There's always some newcomers to the tree as well!  I only became a fan of Kamen Rider since October, when I got this figure.  I scoured the internets trying to figure out exactly which version of the first Kamen Rider this was.  Turns out he's the first version, period!  Exactly how he appeared in the first episode of Kamen Rider.  I ended up researching it through the night and consecutive nights and realized pretty much all the themes and designs were right up my alley.  So Kamen Rider gets a nice spot up by the star.

And finally, this is one particular ornament that means a lot to me.  It's supposed to be a rabbit, but since I was a little one, I couldn't put ornaments very high on the tree.  So in '89 or so we got our first dog, Cody!  ...and she chewed what she could get her mouth on.  She was young, at the time!  It's gona happen.  Anyway, she pulled down that rabbit and chewed the ears right off.  I had to put it higher on the tree after that, when I was a kid, but since then (and now that I've brought it to my own home) I have put the rabbit low on the tree in reverence to Cody, who passed away in old age around 2003.  Now she can reach it whenever she wants!

So that's the tree for this year!  Hope ya'll have a good general holiday, and if you don't celebrate anything around this time, well have as good a day as you'd have in any other time.  It's the season of giving and good cheer, but hey, why keep that all to just one season?  Go have some fun - ALL THE TIMES.