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True, the cars depicted are actually Hot Wheels brand, but Hot Wheels parent company Mattel acquired the rights to Matchbox in 1996, so they’re pretty much the same thing, and I can’t think of a cutesy title linking Hot Wheels to Christmas.

Yeah, it’s mostly pictures these days. If I’m not chained to a desk, I’m chained to a pretend-desk in my apartment, and if I’m not chained to either of those, I’m catching a glimpse of daytime and taking pictures of stuff.

I don’t like that the Christmas season (a.k.a. pressure-shopping time period) begins earlier every year, but I liked seeing this tree. Instead of a cookie-cutter plastic pine with a few variations on a common-themed ornament hanging on it, it’s a bunch of Matchbox cars, which were some of my favorite toys as a kid.

All the new ones are made of plastic now, but I had some really old ones made of metal. I’m not sure if they were my dad’s or not, but I played with them as far back as I can remember. There were four, each of them one solid color with little difference in detailing: red, orange, green, and blue. The blue one looked like my dad’s old Pontiac Lemans. Come to think of it, if you painted all those cars blue, they’d probably all look like my dad’s old Pontiac Lemans.

His car ran okay but it looked like it was born old. I think it was a 60s model. He extended the life of the muffler by reattaching it with a soup can. I could still hear him coming home from a mile away, so if I was doing anything bad, I had a few minutes to wrap it up before he caught me.

I had some newer plastic cars too and a mat with roads and buildings painted on it to run the cars on. I don’t remember if I had a specific story to it. I guess I didn’t need one. I had cars and a road. That was enough.

Actually, that would be enough now. Is it too late to get my Camaro back?