Old toys.

I had heard the View-Master was coming back, but I don't think I believed it until one day in Staples...

View-Masters have been around since 1939, and I'm sure you've stuck your eyes in one at some point in your life. I don't think I ever had one, but plenty of my friends did. In those days 3-D movies were a headache-inducing novelty and considered an old and failed theater promotion, but 3-D pictures were still pretty neat. With the View-Master's stereoscopic reels, you could view all kinds pictures -- often nature or science scenes, but a lot of cartoon stories and other lighter fare -- as if you were looking at it through a pair of binoculars. Hours of fun? No, not really, but of more than passing interest.

We have a tendency to think that these days the young whipper-snappers have no desire for old-fashioned toys, what with their jetpacks and hovercars. And there may be something to that. Kids are notoriously fickle and easily bored. The View-Master Classic, seen above with nature reels from Discovery Kids, might excite children who really dig wildlife (and there are many), but leave others bored.

But now there's also the View-Master Deluxe Virtual Reality Viewer, a collaboration of Google and Mattel, which uses apps and a reel and sound and all kinds of I don't even know. All I can tell is that it is a much more immersive experience from the old 3-D reels, or even a mere iPad game, and over $20 more than the old low-tech Classic set. I guess it would more closely track what kids today expect out of a toy.

My point today is not about the superiority or inferiority of new toys or old toys. New toys have novelty, which is a positive quality and prevents staleness. But old toys have endurance. What's simpler than a basketball and a hoop? And yet suburbia is riddled with them.

I will say that the happiest Christmas morning face I saw was on a little girl who got her baby doll. Just a simple doll; I don't think it even cried or wet like the old-school dolls. The key was that a sweet baby doll was exactly what she wanted and exactly what she got, and the joy on her face looked like something I'm not sure an adult can even feel. Pestered as we are by worries and duties, by the long view of love and loss, can an adult even have that complete and unmitigated joy, especially from something so simple?

When Jean Shepherd says at the end of A Christmas Story that he had gotten "The greatest Christmas gift I had ever received, or would ever receive," you understand. In life our loved ones may give us things of greater value, gifts even of great sentiment or sacrifice, but to be a plain and grateful recipient of a heart's desire is not something of which many of us are capable as adults. The gift of gratitude is the gift we give the giver and the gift we give ourselves.