Christmas Past & Present

I hope everyone had a great couple of days no matter what you were doing or celebrating. Christmas Eve we visited with my brother-in-law's family and my 3 year old nephew and 6 year old niece. They both got early gifts in the form of kid-friendly Nabi tablets.
Let me tell you, for a "kid's" tablet, it looks pretty good under the hood!
My niece and I had fun playing Vs. Fruit Ninja.

Back in my day (pipe down old man!), the equivalent gift of the time would have been an Atari 2600. It's crazy to think how tech savvy today's kids will group up to be. Speaking of Christmases long, long ago, here's a Polaroid from 1980 of me opening a still mint in box 12" IG-88 action figure. If you squint really hard, there's an Atari 2600 under the TV back there.

Here's a little visual rundown of the goodies from this year...

An Adventure Time calendar to replace my 2012 one and lots of magnets! I have the large Finn and Jake ones on my car now but they're sun faded so I think I'm going to replace them with the one of them together.

A very cool Doctor Who calendar and pen. As you can see, this calendar is celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Doctor in 2013. Each month features a large head silhouette of a Doctor containing images related to him. The month of December is a TARDIS silhouette with all the Doctors in it.

The Halloween Kid dons a mask to keep Trick or Treaters safe from monsters.
I talked back in February about Liō and I can't wait to go through his latest book.
The subtitle of The Stupidest Angel reads "A heartwarming tale of Christmas terror."
That Halloween book is a monstrous anthology weighing in around 520 pages.

Yay! I'm so excited to finally get to see Cartoon Lagoon! From everything I've heard it's supposed to be a great tribute to all things Saturday morning.
I'm equally thrilled (and chilled) to be able to dive into Spine Tingler! The William Castle story. If you follow my monthly movie recaps, you know I'm a fan of Castle's films. This guy was the P.T. Barnum of movies. There's also some footage from the premier of Vincent Price's The Tingler which should be interesting as well.
I've seen American Graffiti more than a few times and I love it. I have a crazy love of 50s/60s hot rod culture and music.

Ghost Castle is the newest in a long line of remakes of the game Which Witch? from 1970. I've had a thing for board games with traps since I picked up Superstition as a kid at a yard sale. I have a copy of the 1985 European release of this, also called Ghost Castle. You can read a history of the game's incarnations over at Monsterfink's blog. I'm sure I'll do a post in the future about this game and if I'm feeling ambitious, compare the two Ghost Castles.

EDIT: I just realized I forgot to post the stuff I got from my parents! Oops! 

The Tales of the Red Panda books are based on the podcast of the same name from Decoder Ring Theater. If you enjoy old time radio shows of pulp heroes and hard boiled noir detectives, check out their shows. They're all free!
Zombie Pulp is an anthology.
The Logan's Run tv series will be interesting to check out after all this time. I'll have to see if I can snag the movie BluRay for $10 at Target now.