N is for Nostalgia - Christmas Bits

The last of the seasonal stuff I think, and an eclectic trio, one's been in the collection for decades, one arrived yesterday and the other pair are 'found objects' from this year's forensic crap.

This - shot earlier in the year as I was sorting stuff - is the box and contents (less the carefully removed charms) of a set we looked at here, a few years back, and as I said then, the set's vaguely titled 'Old World Series' but there's no apparent or hard-and-fast branding, it's the sort of thing Tom Smith might have been behind as contract-manufacturers/wholesalers for someone else, and is most interesting for the cross-over from bass-metal to plastics (see link).

This came yesterday, in a parcel from Kazakhstan! The contents of the parcel will make a separate post, but I thought this was charming, it's an old Soviet-era Christmas card, and apart from the Cyrillic-language of the 'Merry Xmas' (or whatever) message, is no different to similar cards available in the west, then or now.

You see, it's important to realise - as Putin masses troops on Ukraine's boarders - that away from the shit of capitalist industrialists, religious conservatives or those who would rule us, we are all the same, with the same hopes or dreams, sensibilities or sentimentalities, and while you can go-off those who get taken-in by the populists, they aren't 'our' wars, and there is enough money, right-now, on this planet, to feed, house and clothe every man, woman and child - approximately $250,000 per head.

The fact that a few dozen fuckwits are using most of it to have public ego-tripping, penis-size competitions, whether of the Putin/Bolsanaro/Trump type, or the Musk/Bezos/Branson type is immaterial - they will kill us all, while we buy their shit or vote for them!

Found these in Mum's papers! The exclamation mark is because we did get novelty combs in our Christmas stockings, several times I think, and one year we got elephants, which were styled like these (I still have mine somewhere I think?), and were the same red and blue.

Now, knowing how fair-minded Mum was, I suspect she intended to give us these the next year with colours reversed, but lost them in her chaotic filing system, as with the second pair of markers? I'll never know for sure now, sadly, but that that is what they were for - Christmas stockings - I have no doubt! I shall, at some point, pass them on to other little people, for the intended purpose.