Winky Dink

When we first got a tv, one of the most popular kids' shows was Winky Dink. You had to send away for a special green plastic sheet to put over the tv and then you would draw on the screen whatever they told you to draw....like dot to dot, if I remember right. Another show we all enjoyed was Howdy Doody. Did you know that the guy who played Clarabelle the Clown on that show later became Captain Kangaroo?
Life was full of things we would now consider weird...like free records that came on cereal boxes, S & H green stamps that our mothers redeemed for all kinds of goodies, Lincoln logs, erector sets, Tinker Toys.
At the Quinn house, we were blessed. Our favorite Aunt, Agnes worked for Marx Toys and each year we would make a pilgrimage to her house to pick up the toys. If you were over 12 yrs old you could stay up all night on Christmas Eve and put together forts, doll houses, farms, and a zillion other neat things for the younger kids. One treat that I always loved at Christmas was tangerines in the stockings and there always seemed to be a lot of walnuts to crack and cheese logs to sample.
One Quinn tradition was to go thru the neighborhood with genuine jingle bells in the middle of the night and try to fool kids into believing we were Santa's sleigh arriving.
But my favorite thing at Christmas was trying to fool my dad with some VERY strange gift. One year it was three bottles of Old Spice...each had two little handles on it...so he was trying to guess what had six handles for weeks before the big day. Another year it was a cast-iron doo-dad with a screw mechanism thru it...we never did figure out what it was. But best of all was the year Dad found the shepherd's hook in the hall closet that Amy had used for a Bow-Peep costume at Halloween. It was a stick with a wire hook on the end all wrapped in newspaper. Someone wrapped it again in Xmas paper and gave it to Old Gold (my dad's nickname) with much glee. He kept unwrapping until he got to the stick and wire hook and decided it was a "chicken catcher"!