In a photograph my mother snapped on Christmas morning 1968, I sit, pajama-clad, to the right of the tree next to my little sister, Diane, who is all of 5 years old and happy with her doll, as I, a goofy 6-year-old, grin at something I hold in my hand.

That something was a space-age-looking laser gun made of gold and red plastic, whose only virtue was the space-age sound it made when you pressed the space-age trigger. I didn’t care. This was the era of “Lost in Space” and “Star Trek,” and I dug it.

My big brother, Jim, got Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots that day. A photo taken later that Christmas day caught Jim and our neighbor, Craig Cogger, good friend and fierce competitor, going at the match game, hammer and tongs, to land the killer blow on the block, the plastic head of his opponent’s robot, to make the head pop up — match over.

I don’t know which one of us six kids got the Incredible Edibles that year, a kit chock-full of nasty goop and tubes of indescribable stuff that you squeezed out, cooked up on the heating plate provided, and, gulp, ate. We never asked what toxic stuff was in there. We were just kids. To this day, my senses retain the smells and tastes of those incredible inedibles and I reel. Yecch!

And I can’t recall who got the wooden, no-tech Lincoln Logs with which one built things. Or the actual football and baseball. Just the other day I found on the flyleaf of Dr. Seuss’s “Horton Hears a Who” a Christmas message from my parents.

If there were any hurt feelings over gifts expected but not present under the tree, no one ever said anything, or I have forgotten.

Those days, when my mother broke out of their box in the garage the bubbly lights that fascinated me but are now outlawed, are long gone. My parents are gone, as are Jim and Craig Cogger. All the other players are scattered.

How things have changed.

Every Christmas these days, the news shocks us with tales of fights that break out in stores between rivals for the latest, high-tech, popular toy for their kiddos, who just have to have it. Personally, if my folks had had to punch, kick or bite their way to the front of the line to get the prize, laying competitors out flat or bloodied as they went, I wouldn’t have wanted any part of such a present. That would not have been Christmas.

There were never any “footballs for grandma” in our home, as we call a gift ostensibly for the old lady’s delight, but really for the gift-giver to lay hands on when the silver-haired one finds no use for it, which she wouldn’t. That was the point. I actually knew a guy that did that, and with an actual football.

All this is to say I hope that your memories are as warm as mine.

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.