Nostalgia for childhood

I enter the room, both timidly and impatiently, where a New Year's miracle must have already happened. Here, on a stool, intricately decorated with cotton wool, my beauty, a one-and-a-half-meter PVC tree, bristles with rare branches! The day before, my brother and I decorated it the same way millions of Soviet families did: with clothespin toys made of very thin glass, which would crumble in your fingers with any wrong move. There was a pyramid, and a hare, and a Russian beauty, and an oriental beauty, and some pretty old lady in a red headscarf, and there were also plastic balls with a cavity surrounded by luxurious plastic lace, in which you could hide something small, it was reflected in the mirror surface, and there were also fancy balls, a little reminiscent of an apple bitten on all sides, with indentations in the glass. In the end, we varnished everything with tinsel and tinsel. There were problems with the tinsel: firstly, if it was last year's tinsel, it had to be untangled first, secondly, the plate on which it was held had to be hidden somewhere unnoticed. Where to put it? Well, maybe tuck it under the tip... By the way, why tinsel, it's winter, right?

So I run to the tree, and there are the flagship positions of "Detsky Mir": the game "Elektronika: Nu, pogodi!" for me and a table basketball with buttons for my brother! Oh, and two more plastic bags, filled to the brim with candies and - sweet gifts are not only harmful, but also useful! - a couple of tangerines. For some reason, in childhood, all tangerines were loose and sweet, and easy to peel. And our friends received the same bags with loose tangerines, luxurious "Grilyazh" in green wrapper and "Snezhok" caramels for the New Year. Friends came to visit us, enjoyed the role of a wolf catching eggs on the tiny screen of "Elektronika", and the next New Year they themselves became happy owners of the same game. And we went to visit friends, and, impressed by what we saw, asked our parents or Santa Claus to give us Monopoly, a programmable all-terrain vehicle, or an electric board game called Catch the Fish.

The atlas "World and Man", "Tales of the Peoples of the World" under the purple cover and "Tales of Foreign Writers" under the yellow cover, a book with three tales: "Mowgli", "Karlson" and "Winnie the Pooh" were, like these toys, in almost every home. We are so different, but still we have common memories!