(Days of work remaining until holiday time off: 1)
This is long. Buckle in.
A few years back, I tried to put together a post of every Christmas I was alive -- how old I was, what I was doing, where I was living, and everything I remembered about it -- year by year. I believe I scrapped it and didn't put it up here because it got very long and there were just a lot of details I couldn't remember. Yes, I remember a good 70% or so of the 80s, because I lived through them, but I don't remember solid, vivid details about a lot of the Christmases involved -- I just remember feelings, I remember some events that would stick with me and helped shape who I was as a child, or were otherwise just some of those "core memory" sort of feelings and other little snippets that I could fondly recall. I'll write about this too, eventually.
However, the 90s were much more vivid for me. It's the 90s where I developed my love of Christmas, and Christmas traditions within our family were solidified, where the holidays began carrying a sort of magic for me that I still chase in one form or another even now, over thirty years later. Nostalgia runs strong and deep in my blood, and so much from the 90s still sticks with me in one form or another. So, this post is a story about the things I loved about the holidays during those years, as well as some of the gifts I gave, and got, during those years.
Mind you, not all of the 90s were great -- I mean that from a personal perspective as well as a historical one. The beginning of the 90s was traumatic for me as my mother had just married my abusive former stepfather, and the end of the 90s was traumatic for me because I was in my angsty high school years and suffered greatly from depression. A lot.
Christmas in the early 90s involved a lot of back and forth. If I wasn't doing Christmas Eve with my father (which, I think, the last time I did that was 1990 or 1991, and I only did it once after he married my stepmother), it was spent in Fairmont, WV at the house of my former stepfather's parents -- I slept in the small guest room/sewing room and my mother and stepfather slept in his (much nicer/larger) bedroom. I can't say I slept much, though -- I was still at the age where Christmas gifts were everything to me, and the anticipation would keep me awake much of the night, staring at the ceiling. This was, of course, the age before cell phones, several years before I would even own a Game Boy or similar gaming system, and it was my sole hope every year that I would get a Nintendo or Sega Genesis. My cousins had a Nintendo and all I wanted was to be able to play video games like they could at any time. I could not understand why or how they could get tired of it, how they didn't want to play it every waking hour.
I never got one during those years. I occasionally got an off-brand Transformer figure and a lot of NASCAR stuff, as I was really into NASCAR at the time (before, well, a few of my favorite drivers died and multiple others retired). I got a lot of clothes and occasionally a cassette tape here and there -- I remember in 1991 I got the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze soundtrack on cassette, which was a big deal to me because that was also the year I got a good GE radio/cassette player, which I still own to this day, and a pack of tapes that I used to record songs off the radio.
Christmas in the early 90s would usually operate in one fashion or another -- if we did the Christmas Eve and morning thing in Fairmont, that afternoon we'd drive to my grandmother's house a county away for the family dinner. The early 90s are what I really refer to as "peak Christmas" for my family's gatherings. All of the kids of my generation were between the ages of 6 and 20 -- as an adolescent I was right in the middle of this -- and all of the aunts and uncles were in their 30s and 40s, with the only exception to this being my grandmother (who was in her mid-60s at the time; she lived to be 90). The grand total of people doing Christmas in my grandmother's small double-wide trailer? If everyone came, it was well over 20 people. I did the math and some years it could've been 22-24. That's a LOT of people for one small space with one bathroom and a very small kitchen/small stove and refrigerator.
Yet, every year, my grandmother made Christmas dinner happen. Some of the aunts and uncles brought some of the larger dishes -- one of my aunts was always in charge of the mashed potatoes, another was in charge of the ham, and others brought various side dishes and desserts. My grandmother usually handled the rolls and butter, but her centerpiece dessert every year that she was always very proud of was her giant bowl of jello, into which she would always put fruit -- bananas, grapes, sometimes the little mandarin oranges, etc. Most of the time it was red jello with bananas, though. I loved it and never could figure out how she could get it to "set" with the fruit suspended in it. I still don't know how it was done to this day.
All of her kids and grandkids, from each family, would get my grandmother a gift. There were seven families (because there were seven of her children) so each year, each family would give her a "family gift" -- sometimes it was something for the kitchen, sometimes it was pajamas or slippers or fancy foods like the Hickory Farms gift sets or something like that. I don't know that or if she ever used the vast majority of it. When the house was cleaned out years later (when she was moved into a smaller trailer below the old one on the same family property) I was told they many of those things were found just stuffed into the backrooms, their boxes never opened again after the Christmas wrapping had been removed.
My grandmother had a tradition that everyone in the family got one gift from her, and there was generally a price limit of $20 for the kids and $50 for the married couples. She was already getting old though and couldn't shop for hours on end the way she used to back in the 80s, so by the 90s (especially the mid-to-late 90s) she would give a list and the money to her youngest two kids (my youngest aunt and youngest uncle) and would send them off to pick up the items for everyone. In the 80s, when I was a very young child, she did it all herself in person and the three of them would go do that shopping together in various stores/towns, from Morgantown to Fairmont to Waynesburg, PA. As she got older, that stopped almost completely, and by the end of the 90s she was just giving cash to everyone inside Christmas cards instead of actual gifts.
Many gifts from the 1990s, from my grandmother, I fondly remember. Most years I'd either get a videotape of a movie I wanted, or I'd get one of the Tiger handheld electronic games. My original VHS copies of Batman Forever (1995) and Independence Day (1996) were Christmas gifts from my grandmother. In 1993 or 94 she got me the Tiger handheld version of Mortal Kombat, which I was thrilled to receive.
As the 90s went on, and as my mother divorced my abusive former stepfather, holidays began to change. My mother met the man I refer to here as my Dad in the summer of 1993, and by the following summer the long separation and divorce from said stepfather was finalized and we were living on our own in a large, but fairly expensive apartment in Morgantown. We'd extricated ourselves from a bad situation and were finally free again -- a single mother and her twelve-year-old son, a son whose actual father had written him off for good a year prior, and suddenly the family Christmas was the only Christmas we had.
Christmas 1994 was strange and unlike any other Christmas I think I've ever had. We were finally on our own, but we had very little. I was not doing well in school -- truth be told, I'd lost almost all interest in school once I started reading and collecting comics about two years prior, and with the separation and divorce stuff going on, I focused on the comics and writing/drawing. I detached myself from most reality, I got really into the Power Rangers -- even though I got made fun of in school for liking them -- and just tried to be a kid. There was so much I'd missed out on living with the very strict disciplinarian who was my former stepfather, and because of that there was so much early 90s culture that had been forbidden to me -- stuff that I was not allowed to do, watch, or have -- major cultural touchstones in movies, music, and television that I was not allowed to experience. I never got a Nintendo. I never got a Game Boy, and when we moved into that apartment, we didn't even have a VCR. Our TV was very old and from the early 80s, purchased secondhand. Furniture was either gifted to us or also purchased secondhand, until my mother could finally afford to get a living room set and a table. We lived frugally for some time.
But, for Christmas that changed.
We'd continued the tradition, started a few years before, that on or around my birthday we would drive to Pittsburgh to have dinner at the Olive Garden and to go Christmas shopping at the Century III Mall. I've written about these trips here before -- they were something I looked forward to every year. Pittsburgh is about 90 miles north of Morgantown, and given that it was winter, sometimes the trip would be delayed a day or two or we'd go a day or two earlier than normal to beat incoming weather, but it was always as close to my birthday as possible. I think the earliest we ever did the trip was December 18th, and the latest probably December 23, depending on the year. In all of my years I think there was only a very few years that we skipped this tradition when I was living at home -- one was the first winter that Mom and I were alone before she'd really solidified her relationship with my Dad, and I remember another year that I was really sick/tired and did not want to go (my parents still went on their own), but I believe by that time I was already in college.
In 1994 though, I believe it was just me and Mom, and I remember we went on the trip two nights before my birthday. She'd asked me what I wanted that year and I told her either a Super Nintendo or a Sega Genesis -- it really didn't matter to me which one. I showed them both to her in the Electronics Boutique in Century III Mall, showed her the games I liked and/or would have wanted for each one, etc. She actually paid very close attention to my "presentation," so to speak. Both systems at the time were the same price -- $99.99.
As an aside, what's absolutely wild to me as an adult looking back on this nearly thirty years later is that the new-design, top-loading NES system at that time was $49.99 (and may have been cheaper depending on Christmas sales) pretty much anywhere, and had thousands of well-known games for it -- I could've had one of those and the system itself would have been worth waaaaay more on the collectors' market today than both the Genesis and SNES combined, including the games I was interested in. I, at the time, was not interested in the NES anymore -- I wanted the newest, up-to-date system(s) that all of my friends in school had.
We came home with other gifts and I thought nothing else of it. Honestly I don't think I thought about it again. But, the next night, my aunt brought me a wrapped birthday gift from my grandmother, and I wasn't allowed to open it before my birthday. Even then I didn't think much about it. It was small, it was a wrapped hard box, and I assumed it was a videotape or another handheld Tiger game.
The morning of my birthday -- I turned twelve that year -- before my mother was awake, I opened my gift from my grandmother. It was a copy of Batman Returns for the Sega Genesis, in its hardshell plastic case, brand new. I remember going to my mother with it and saying something along the lines of "okay, where's the Genesis?" and holding the game up so she could see the jig was up.
That was what my mother had gotten me for my birthday, obviously -- she'd split up from me and doubled back to the Electronics Boutique while I had gone off to get gifts for her, and had purchased the Genesis -- which came with Sonic Spinball as the pack-in game -- and had run it back to the car before meeting up with me again to go home.
It was one of the best Christmas gifts I'd ever received, even though it was really a birthday gift, because it wasn't just about having a video game system of my own -- it was about my mother being able to gift me the freedom to own one, something that had been forbidden for me for years by my former stepfather. It was about letting me be a kid and having the Christmas that I wanted -- a delight that had been stolen from me in my more formative years by the former stepfather. It was a symbol of "fuck that guy" as much as it was a gaming console.
Christmas morning came that year and with it, a few other games -- the one I remember most was Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade's Revenge, which was a truly terrible game and one of the worst games ever produced for any system -- but the box art and pictures looked cool. It wasn't her fault that the game was awful. She didn't know either.
I had that Genesis until 2018 -- nearly 25 years. It blew out its video port sometime in the late 90s and had been sitting in a box, with all its peripherals, until I sold it to a local game store here in Omaha for parts. The games had all been sold long before that, with the exception of the aforementioned Batman Returns game from my grandmother -- that game I played the shit out of, finally beat it, and then traded it to a friend in 6th grade (read: several months later) for his old Game Boy. Yes, he traded me a Game Boy for a four-year-old Genesis cartridge. I think I got the better deal on that one.
I had gone from having zero game systems to having two current ones in less than the span of a year.
With the former stepfather's family Christmas time eliminated (and good riddance, I couldn't stand those people....well, okay, his dad was a good/decent enough person), for the second half of the decade, our Christmases would change a lot. First and foremost, my mother was now with the man I call my Dad and would be from that point forward. It did not take long for me to see him as a father figure and likewise, for him to begin treating me like his own son. He had three children of his own from his previous marriages -- my oldest brother was twelve years older than me, so he was already well into his twenties by the time my parents met. His middle son was two years older than me, and his daughter was four years younger than me. His family was large -- he had two sisters with children, his parents, and various aunts and uncles of his generation and the previous generation, and all of them had a family Christmas (as well as all other holiday gatherings) at their family home in southwestern Pennsylvania. I believe we began attending these, all as a cohesive family unit, around 1995.
There were some bumps and hurdles, of course. I don't think Dad's family really accepted us for a couple of years. They were happy to have us, and would buy me and my mother nice gifts, would be happy to feed us and have family time with us, but they were always sort of detached from us as we were very clearly the outsiders of the gathering. This softened more as time went on and as we attended more family events/dinners not just on holidays -- we indeed spent a lot of time with that extended family, had many Sunday dinners with them, went to the occasional event with them (like fireworks in the park and that sort of thing), etc. It softened more once Dad's niece also found a man she wanted to marry and eventually did, and he was brought into the family much like we were.
Likewise, in our own family, my Dad was very quickly accepted and brought into the fold -- my family universally hated my former stepfather and had no idea why my mother was with him, and my Dad was a breath of fresh air to the family gatherings. It also helped that the bassist in Dad's band was, coincidentally, someone that almost everyone in the family of my mother's generation had gone to school with, and that Dad's band had played some of the district fairs and school dances -- keep in mind my parents are ten years apart in age.
Anyway.
Christmases, for a couple of years, would start at my grandmother's house with just the three of us, and then Dad would get his kids (except for my oldest brother, who was out on his own and would come by himself) and we'd all head up to Pennsylvania for the family Christmas there. This meant that sometimes Christmas would start at like 6 or 7am when we woke up and did our own Christmas morning, then by 9 or 10 we'd be on the road to my grandmother's house, and then after spending several hours there we'd go to Dad's parents' house for the big family Christmas there, usually getting in riiiiiight around the time dinner was starting -- presents came after dinner -- and we would not get home that night until close to (or sometimes, well after) midnight. If the weather was bad, it took even more time.
This doubling up shit was brutal. I loved the dual family time but my mother was in her 30s at the time and Dad was in his 40s and as time went on, it became harder to actually do it all every year. Add to that the fact that sometimes his kids had special Christmas plans with their mother that we'd have to work around, and within 3-4 years at most, it became untenable. For one, it was hell on my parents the next day if the day after Christmas was a weekday, as they'd have to get up and go right back to work. As a kid in middle/high school when Christmas break was a thing, this wasn't an issue for me.
Luckily for us, by the late 90s our own family's Christmas gatherings had become unstable. The older kids of my generation were getting married and/or having kids of their own, and a lot of squabbling between the brothers of the family was firing up. By the end of the 90s, half of the family was doing one dinner that some others may or may not attend, and the other half wasn't bothering to come to my grandmother's house. By the early 2000s they would switch up where and who was doing the Christmas dinner at which house and they would just go get my grandmother to take her there. The last everyone family dinner we had was Thanksgiving in 1999 at my uncle's house, and the last holiday dinner we had that multiple families (but not everyone) attended was Easter, at another uncle's house, in 2003.
That meant that we only had one place to go for big holidays from the late 90s forward -- and that was to Dad's parents' house in Pennsylvania. Christmas there was an event every year. My mother used to call it "a production" because it was very elaborate, very structured, and like a stage play.
Everyone would need to be there by 4, no exceptions, or dinner was starting without you. If dinner started without you, you were basically on your own because nobody was getting up from the table until dinner was over. Get a plate, get in line, serve yourself, find somewhere to sit. Kids sit at the kids table in the living room. Adults sit around the kitchen table and around the dining room table. After dinner was coffee and desserts, if warranted and available. Then all of the food was put away and the kitchen was cleaned, and the tables were cleared. Only the immediate family was allowed to help do this (my mother offered for several years before she was allowed to help clean up). Shelf-stable desserts like cookies, brownies, and the like were left out on platters so people could graze on them as they wanted.
After all of this was done, everyone would gather in the living room and find a sitting spot. And it had better be a comfortable spot, because you weren't going to move for hours -- several hours. Why? Because you wouldn't be able to, not with the chaos that was about to erupt. Dad's family had a very specific tradition where everyone opens their gifts one by one from the youngest (all of the youngest grandkids and kids) to the oldest (Dad's parents -- both of whom are now deceased). Before this process, however, you had to get your seat because all of the gifts would be distributed and put in piles in front of everyone's sitting spot. There those gifts would sit until it was your specific turn to open them. When it was your turn, you were the center of attention -- you'd open your gift, hold it up and show everyone what it was, say who it was from, and let everyone ooh and ahh at it -- usually this would also be accompanied by a short story from the gift-giver as to why this particular gift was given and where it was found. You'd do this one by one until all of your gifts were gone, at which point your time in the spotlight would be over and they'd move to the next oldest person.
I lived through this throughout enough years to where I figured it was normal, that's just how all big families did their Christmases -- and it wasn't until I was well into my adult years where I realized just how bizarre all of it was. Once Daisy and I got together and we began having Christmases with her sisters, their husbands, and the kids -- even before Daisy and I were married -- I remember being puzzled that everyone just opened their gifts all at once and they didn't necessarily focus on one person at a time. Sometimes we did, as adults, but the kids? Hell no, the kids wanted to tear into everything as soon as possible.
So, because the family Christmas presents started with the kids -- all of the youngest kids first, guess who had the most presents? If you said "the youngest kids, all five or six of them at the time" you'd be correct -- from the infants on up through the teenagers and adult kids and then to the actual adults, the present counts would slowly decrease and the "production" would speed up, but every year it took a very long time to get through the kids' stuff. This time only increased once my oldest brother got married and had their first kids, and when my Dad's niece got married and had her own kid.
I was right in the middle of the kids' lot -- I was in my teenage years in the 90s during the heyday of this, so in the beginning I was third, and by the time the 2000s rolled around I was fourth, fifth, and then sixth as more kids were being born into the family.
I will also stress that these weren't little gifts either -- some of them were pretty large and/or expensive, enough to rival the gifts I got from my parents at times. From Dad's family I got many videotapes (Men in Black, Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: The Movie, and a bunch of anime), a ton of Star Wars figures and merchandise during the re-releases and the prequels, a lot of music on CD, a lot of good clothing (band t-shirts, some pants, and an Old Navy performance fleece that I wore for many years) as well as stuff like food, coffee, candies, board/card games, etc. It was always a really good haul from the family -- and I was always surprised by the gifts they'd lavish on me.
Once the kids were all done, we tended to gather our stuff and take it out to the car. My brother usually had a game system with him -- I remember the year he got the Atari Jaguar, which was wild at the time -- and we'd hook it up to the small TV in the kitchen and play games while all of the adults would take another two or three hours to open their gifts. If I got a book that year, I'd usually spend some time reading it. If the weather wasn't awful, sometimes we'd go outside in the night and play in the snow. When I became a smoker in college, I would step outside onto the porch and smoke a few cigarettes just to get away from the noise and hubbub for a bit, as by that time I was much older and was no longer really "one of the kids."
Eventually, as the years went on and the generations grew up and/or got much older, the focus became more on the kids and grandkids and my mother and I would continue to go just to see everyone, but it wasn't as much an event as it had been in my teenage years when all the kids of my generation were much younger -- the focus was now on the new additions to the family, of which there were many (my oldest brother alone had three kids over the course of seven years or so). Eventually my mother and I just sort of...phased out of it? I don't know how to describe it other than that. The last year we both attended the big family Christmas was 2004, I think. I was getting ready to graduate college, and the youngest kids at the time were slightly older than toddlers. Once I graduated college and moved out of the house, Dad would go by himself to the family Christmas, sometimes with or without his own kids as well (depending on their own holiday plans). As far as I know, the family Christmases continued for many years afterwards, including after Dad's father's death a few years ago -- however, with the death of his mother about a month ago now, they may be all done now.
I mentioned above that during the 90s was when I got into a lot of the "traditions" that I still hold dear today, that the 90s was when most of my warm-and-fuzzy memories associated with Christmas or for the season in general got their start, and that's true. I hate to really say it but a lot of them are commercially-based -- and by that I mean "in the spirit of commerce and consumption" not "holiday television commercials." A lot of my best memories of holidays in the 90s involve shopping and excursions to do things that I didn't normally get to do, simply because it was my birthday or Christmastime.
I've mentioned here before, and even above, about the Pittsburgh trips to Century III Mall around my birthday every year. Malls in the 90s were magical places, and Century III was one of the best in the area. Occasionally we'd go to South Hills Village, as well, though Century III was always the clear winner in my book -- because the Olive Garden, Burlington Coat Factory, and Best Buy were all right next to it.
Dinners at the Olive Garden were quite special and magical to me -- mind you, this was the 90s, and I didn't exactly grow up in a wealthy environment. This food was fancy to me and it was an absolute event. My choice was usually the Tour of Italy -- it was my go-to year after year. I believe it's actually still on the menu. It was chicken parm, fettucine alfredo, and a big slice of lasagna. Nothing ever tops my mother's lasagna, but Olive Garden came pretty close. The excitement of that coupled with the salad and unlimited breadsticks -- plus, usually, a dessert of tiramisu afterwards -- was pure joy to me as a kid. I don't think it would carry that same joy today (even if I were still eating meat, which I'm not) that it carried in the 90s.
The next stop was always Burlington -- which, in the 90s was also a much different place than it is today. "Coat Factory" was still part of its name, and it definitely played the part -- the entire basement/downstairs of Burlington (because yes, it was a two-story Burlington in Pittsburgh) was coats, trenchcoats, parkas, suit jackets, etc. I got my first two trenchcoats in Burlington in the 90s -- a black one in 1996 and a gray one in 1998. The black one I wore well into college until it eventually just disintegrated into scraps, and the gray one I wore after that for many years, until I finally donated it to Goodwill well after Daisy and I were married. Both coats were birthday or Christmas gifts in their respective years.
I got a lot of other clothing from Burlington over the years as well -- several denim vests, many pairs of jeans, most of my socks, some sweaters and button-up shirts, etc. They weren't as "fast fashion" back then as they are today -- they didn't carry a lot of t-shirts with comic/anime characters or logos on them at the time. They were just a basic clothing retailer for normal folks, and as a fat kid I was always thrilled that they carried stuff in my size for not a lot of money, stuff that would last a few years and not quickly fall apart. Some years during the December trip up there, I'd get a lot of stuff (I just counted it as birthday/Christmas presents, because the vast majority of it I didn't pay for myself, the parents bought it); other years it was a bust and I couldn't find much of anything. As the 90s transitioned into the 2000s, the latter started becoming the common outcome.
Sometimes after Burlington, but before the mall, we'd go to Best Buy too. This became more frequent in the later 90s and afterwards (98, 99, 2000 etc) once my parents had bought our house on top of the mountain together and after we had a giant TV, 5-disc DVD player, and my PlayStation (1998 Christmas gift). We didn't always hit up Best Buy. Sometimes it was getting late in the day and we either weren't interested or wouldn't have time to work it in. If we went on a weekday for this trip, eventually the parents would begin to just take the day off for us to get an early start and be able to do it with enough time to get everything done, because if we left for Pittsburgh when they got off work at 5pm, depending on weather it could take two hours to get there from Morgantown, then dinner for another hour or more, and by the time we would even start shopping it could and frequently would be after 8 or later. It just wasn't possible to fit everything in, so by the later 90s it became an all-day thing -- my parents would take the day off work for my birthday (or we'd leave early on a Saturday or Sunday morning if my birthday fell anywhere near close to a weekend) and just make it an event. Also, by the time the later 90s rolled around, and I was getting older and could appreciate electronics/music/games, Dad's kids would sometimes come along with us on said trip -- when they did, Best Buy was always a stop we made.
For those of you who weren't alive in the 90s, or are too young to remember, Best Buy in the 90s was an amazing place if you were a music and video game nerd like I was. I'm not sure how many things I actually purchased over the years on those trips, either for myself or for other people, but it was a magical time when if there was a particular record you were looking for, if you couldn't find it at Best Buy, you likely wouldn't be able to find it anywhere else. In the years where VHS and DVD could be found on shelves together, you could also find DVD-audio discs -- DVDs that were music-only albums and were to be played in your DVD player with apparently "better" sound quality. I never had any, but quirky stuff like this is a lot of what I remember -- aisles filled with tube televisions or big-screen projection TVs (not flatscreens), or giant Packard Bell or IBM-branded computers with a whopping 16MB of RAM and a Pentium 1, 166mhz processor being advertised as "lightning fast" or "this computer will never be obsolete!"
It can all be yours for $1,900! With a 16-inch monitor that weighs eighty-five pounds!
Yeah, electronics shopping in the 90s was wild, all.
Not to mention the video games. Aisles upon aisles of video game systems, games, display consoles you could play demos on, and everything video-game related. In the mid-90s this wasn't a big deal to me; I just had the Genesis and the Game Boy, and both consoles were on their way out at the time to make room for the next generation of systems like the N64, Saturn, and PlayStation. Once I got the PlayStation -- but more importantly, after my brother got his PlayStation -- I began to pay a lot more attention to the games that were available.
By the way, the NES I never got? I did get it in the 90s, in a roundabout way. I was one of the first people I knew with the internet and a decent (at the time) computer, at the time when emulation was first getting off the ground. I therefore had an entire NES collection of roms and an emulator on my first computer by 1998. I vividly remember the night we came home from my oldest brother's wedding, I configured it and spent hours playing The Legend of Zelda and the first few Mario games until I was tired enough to go to sleep.
I did purchase a secondhand NES from a local game shop for $35 when I was in high school.
Anyway.
When we were done at Best Buy, we'd finally hit up the mall, which was usually (because of the season) a madhouse. But, I always had a plan.
You see, every year for my birthday, my godfather (not sure what else to call him, really) would write me a $75 check as a present. It would come in the mail shortly before my birthday and we would generally cash it at the bank on the way to Pittsburgh. That money was my money to do with what I wished. $75 to a kid is a lot of money, honestly, and it was doubly so in the 90s -- quite literally, $75 then was $150 in today's money.
That $75 check every year was my Christmas shopping budget for the parents more often than not. Sometimes I would use it all, sometimes I would use some or most of it, and sometimes I'd spend more on myself than I did them (I was a teenager and was set loose in a thriving mall, so...you do the math there). Usually I had some other cash to supplant it with -- I'd save any other cash I got for a couple of months for the Pittsburgh trip -- but if I didn't have anything else, $75 was what I was working with.
I don't remember a lot of what I got my parents over these years; I know one year I got my mother a $40-something Bath & Body Works gift basket that weighed a ton because it came in a giant glass fishbowl. I remember getting Dad a book or two, or some various comic-related collectibles (he was, and is, a giant nerd to this day, and he's who really got me into comics) and some various electronic things here and there, but for the most part it's impossible to try to remember specifics for different years.
Century III Mall always had multiple stores I'd hit up for multiple reasons, because it was the heyday of mall culture -- and all of those stores no longer exist: Waldenbooks, Babbage's, Electronics Boutique, Kay-Bee Toys, National Record Mart, and the comic shop in the mall (had various names, various locations, and various owners over most of the 90s and early 2000s before eventually shutting down completely).
The stores that I hit up that do still exist are Bath & Body Works, Hot Topic, Spencer Gifts, and Suncoast Motion Picture Company. None of them are the same now as they were in the 90s.
Well, okay, Spencer Gifts is mostly the same. I didn't even think Suncoasts existed anymore, but there's one in Westroads Mall here in Omaha that is open and still doing good business, surprisingly enough.
Anyway, once we were in the mall, we'd set a time and a place to meet back up at (usually an hour or so later), and then we'd all split up and go our separate ways. If my siblings were with us, I'd occasionally run into them as we went to similar stores. If they weren't, then it was a marathon run through all of the stores I needed to peruse before I'd have to get back to meet the parents at the agreed-upon time. Throughout the trip, by hitting up these stores and/or a few others at random if/when I had the time, I could almost always do all of my Christmas shopping in one fell swoop. But, if I'd already done some or all of the necessary gift-shopping at Burlington or Best Buy, whatever money I had left at the mall was all mine to use on whatever I wanted.
As the trip was partially a birthday trip for me (well, it was mostly a birthday trip for me every year), I always looked to get at least one thing for myself -- a birthday present to me, from me. More often than not this was a t-shirt or CD or game of some sort. In different years, I purchased Akira and Ghost in the Shell shirts from Hot Topic -- they were one of the only places where you could get anime-related clothing at the time -- and other years I purchased my first Misfits and NOFX shirts there too. One year I bought a t-shirt in Suncoast that was the poster for Transformers: The Movie when all of the G1 stuff was getting a resurgence and being re-released. I used to scour the discount t-shirt racks in all of these stores for nerdy stuff I couldn't find anywhere else.
I don't own any of that clothing anymore, by the way; this was over 25 years ago now for the most part, and over that time most of it either disintegrated from heavy wear or were later donated in purges of my closet.
At the end of the night, on the ride back home in the backseat, I would either doze off or would be quietly satisfied with the events of the day. It was always a good way to celebrate my birthday and set me in the mood for the remainder of the Christmas season.
We stopped the trips around the time I was ready to graduate from college; I had mostly outgrown the need or desire for them at that point and nasty weather had snarled one or two of them in the later years. Olive Garden was no longer the novelty it once was, and Burlington rarely had anything I was interested in as the years shifted from the 90s into the early-to-mid 2000s. As for Best Buy, as I got older I realized just how inflated their prices were compared to, say, Walmart -- for the exact same things. After 9/11, and after internet shopping began to become the new norm, many of the stores in the mall started quietly shutting down or their parent companies began going out of business or changing/merging with other companies. Waldenbooks and Kay-Bee Toys disappeared. Hot Topic changed its business strategy from goth/punk culture store to more pop-culture store. Babbages merged with Electronics Boutique, which eventually became EB Games and then eventually became Gamestop. Suncoasts began disappearing everywhere. The comic shop in the mall -- somewhere I could almost always find some interesting stuff or back issues in 25-or-50-cent bins, closed down sometime after I started college.
The mall rapidly went through a decline in the late 2000s and closed down for good in 2019, long after I'd moved out of the area. Recent reports say that it is collapsing in on itself and is scheduled to be demolished. The last time I was there was probably 2004 or 2005, and even by that point it was a pale shadow of what it once was. The era had truly ended.
