# 3 -- socks, cologne and an easy bake oven

day 3 of ye ol' advent blog is dedicated to those christmas gifts you just didn't understand....
as you can tell from the title and pictures, some of the gifts josh and i received (but didn't really understand) were socks, cologne and an easy bake oven. now, we had many, many christmas mornings when we were surprised and excited. many good gifts were given in the neiderman household. sometimes i don't know how mom and dad did it....4 kids, mom staying home most of the time we were growing up and living off of one income. things were cheaper then but still, they really had to stretch. so, not to sound ungrateful in this entry, i had to get that out of the way.
back to the pictures...i guess when a boy is growing up and hits a certain age, it becomes very difficult to find appropriate gifts. i remember one christmas when it seemed like josh got nothing but tube socks and stetson cologne. bottles and bottles of cologne. did my family think he smelled bad? did they think the 80's scented cologne was a chick magnet? either way, it was way too much of a bad thing. josh is never one to complain so he really took it in stride. he just loaded up his bundle of goods and made his way to his room. we always enjoyed taking all our new goodies to our rooms to arrange and display them so we could look at them for the next few days and continue the enjoyment....i bet if i looked really hard in his room right now, i would be able to find a bottle of cologne left over from over a decade ago.
now for the easy bake oven....i'm sure most little girls would love to have something like this however, i was more of a ball glove, cleats, swishy wind suit kind of girl. i liked tonka trucks and slingshots, army men and tennis shoes. when i opened my big gift from mom, dad and santa one year it was an easy bake oven. honestly, i didn't even know what it was. i had never heard of one of those contraptions. what the heck was i supposed to do with it? mom and dad saw the crestfallen look on my 9 year old face and knew something was wrong. for some reason they thought they overheard me saying sometime before christmas that i wanted one. i have no idea where they got that because i had never heard/seen one in my life. for about a month i don't think i even opened the box....maybe i was a little afraid of it, i'm not sure. anytime you cook a cake with a light bulb things are bound to turn out bad.
one snowy day later when i had exhausted all other options for entertainment (and had probably been banned from all board games at home) i ended up using that easy bake oven. one sixty watt light bulb and tin pan later we had a delicious, rock hard "chocolate" cake. (of which i made everyone sample.) let's just say the oven was shelved after that attempt and i never heard a word about it from the folks. to this day the easy bake oven is my christmas "poke" from family just as josh's cologne and socks are his poke....no one forgets, most of our family have memories like elephants.
i am thankful for all the gifts i received as a kid. i was always a little embarrassed to open my presents because i felt bad people had spent money on me. we were always very blessed with the giving spirit our family possesses. here's what made the good list:

• karaoke machine
• our dog, nelson
• our dog, kris
• trampoline (guess they got tired of us doing back flips on the bed!)
• rollerskates!
• all the tennis shoes i've received over the years
• my gorgeous lamp from mom
• cameras
• cd player
• the t.v. josh and i got to share (this caused many fights as we each got to keep it in our room for one week at a time....it was horrible when you would really get into a show and the other person would show up to "repo" the t.v. for their week)
• a stereo
• bicycles
• castle greyskull (or was that josh's birthday?)
• my little ponies
• my pearls

mom, dad, mam and pap (both hollon and neiderman) always did good....always thinking of others and teaching us to do the same. there are so many less fortunate and i'm sure they would have been ecstatic to open up socks, cologne and an easy bake oven. :)

"Remember, if Christmas isn't found in your heart, you won't find it under a tree."

~ Charlotte Carpenter