I don't like Christmas anymore. It's just a pain in the hole. Part of the reason why
I feel the magic is gone is that I can easily buy Santa caliber pressies for myself
all year round and I do. Some people say they love the lounging around just eating,
drinking and smoking spliffs but I can do that anytime I want too.

But this year I've tried to inject some magic back into it. Since I first got into eBay way
back in 1999, when you knew where you stood with free porn and smileys and pop-ups
were just a twinkle in some wankers eye, I scoured it looking for a toy of Rosebudian
proportions: The Lil Playmates Space Station.

I first bought it with my Communion money in Rathfarnham Toy Shop and it was the best.
The games and scenarios I used to play with it were better than any cartoon or comic, sometimes it'd be red against yellow, or red and yellow against the aliens or all of them working
together to mine space coal. I had to give it away when my family moved to Canada and
like big fat Citizen Kane I've laid awake pining over it.

When I saw it, complete and boxed on eBay I snapped it up, it was delivered around 3 weeks
ago but I havent opened it. Saving it for Christmas morning in the hope that seeing it and all the rest of my pressies will make me feel something. I don't know, it'll probably just depress the shit out of me but maybe not. Just thinking of it now and a faint trickle of excitement runs down my back, (beats a trickle of excrement down my leg)

I really want to play with it, PLAY with it, bold and italics man!! Not just the same way I'd fiddle with an eBay purchase with my cold adult eye then shelf it, I want to relive those classic
adventures as I remember them. I'll probably have to inject bleach into my head to get the
required state of mind or get a kid to play with me. With the wonderful world of the internerd
our kids will never have to worry about finding the elusive childhood toy or resolving questions
they'll have about cartoons they used to watch, it'll all be instantly attainable and recalled. And that's probably a bad thing.

So Mewwy Christmas one and all! Fuck the lot of yiz I got my Space Station.

Christmas is coming up again and as far as I can tell there’s no clear must-have toy this year. Where are the Elmo’s and Buzz Lightyear’s of yesteryear? When I was about seven or eight years old, the crack of toys were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Or as us poor suckers over here on the East side of the Atlantic knew them, the Teenage Mutant HERO Turtles.

Man, I loved them. I really did. Would have killed for them. Killed bluntly and without stealth, for back in 1987 I wasn’t even aware of their connections to ninjitsu and feudal Japanese spies and assassins.

Apparently, the word ninja was too bellicose for us in the British Isles so, in a move that would have made Joseph Goebbels blush, the censorship boards in the UK and Ireland removed a noun redolent in Eastern mysticism, Japanese heritage and centuries of martial arts and replaced it with a generic Western term that simply meant ‘good’: HERO. Occidental moral absolutism replaced the complex shades and ambiguities of the turbid term ‘ninja’. If you can think of a finer example of Orientalism, well then get Edward Said on the blower and tell him. Oh no wait, he’s dead (an entirely non-ninja-related demise).

And that wasn’t the only change made to make the show more palatable to the blue-rinse set. The lyrics of the title song were excised of the gloriously nebulous word, resulting in lines such as "Splinter taught them to be fighting teens” as opposed to “Splinter taught them to be ninja teens” (fighting of course being better than ninja) and Michelangelo’s nunchakus were replaced with a grappling hook.

In fact all the turtles’ weapons were toned down and stripped of their relationship to the deadly arts (though apparently Bebop and Rocksteady’s laser guns were absolutely fine): their shurikens were phased out, Leonardo’s swords never left their scabbards and Raphael’s became nothing more than a means to climb up walls.

It was only in 2003 that the censorship boards, both here and in the UK, learned the lessons of the McQuaid years and reinstated the ninja back into the turtles. The comeback version featured the proper title given to them by their creators – Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird – and even had some violent elements, like actual fighting and bruising (though no blood).

To quote Potter Stewart, “Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself.” Ireland has always struggled with censorship. The very inception of the state in 1929 set off a celebration of independence that involved a “zeal in the cause of old-maidish prudery [that] achieved laughable, unimaginable, Platonic perfection.” It was only in the throes of national self-confidence and extremely high economic development here that the Turtles finally got back their throwing stars. Haven’t seen it since, but man I hope they fuck shit up…