1987 was the beginning of a new era. The previous year was, to date, the worst Christmas of my life: I knew everything I was getting before I got it and the magic was utterly gone, the perfect capper on an absolute shit sandwich of a year.
1987 was different. I had, over the course of a year, found my first girlfriend (and subsequently gone through my first breakup), been added to varsity scholars’ bowl, and begun actually building friendships at my high school for the first time rather than being torn between the old place and the future. For the first time in memory, I was looking ahead. And that was reflected in my Christmas gifts, the only thing I asked for: an MIT sweatshirt and T-shirt, because for the first time, i was thinking about college. And where did I want to go? Somewhere that was smart and where complicated pranks were a way of life.
Welp.
The other big thing that holiday season was the New Years’ Eve party, at the colossal Mountain Brook home of one of my newer classmates. There must have been fifty people at least at this party, from all different schools, and at one point I was actually knocking out tunes on the piano while some gal I’d never met was grabbing Dr Pepper to keep me fortified (which in turn would lead to one of the few memorable moments of senior year two years on).
Oh, and another thing I got: the boom box with a CD player that would carry me through until my senior year of college. For the first time, I had laser-crisp digital music and the ability to borrow a CD from anywhere and turn it into a better quality tape than I could have bought. That was very nearly the end of taping songs off the radio, because a month or two later I would buy the first of what would become over two hundred cassette singles.
You could make a good case that 1987 was my first adult Christmas – when it stopped being about what you could get and became about who you could be with. And as we piece together what it looks like in a world where we’re older than our parents were then, that’s an important thing to remember.