A boyish christmas

This year on That Uniformed Schoolboy the Christmas entry is a little different.
Anyone familiar with this blog and the Tumblrs The Traditional Schoolboy and The Traditional Schoolboy 2 plus Chris_Minor, will know of the sore that runs from not being given the chance to join up to scouting  not least the Cub Scouts and how I'm trying to do some positive to put some similar character building challenges into my life to provide at least a bit of what I missed.

Thus it is entirely fitting that this Christmas I should have a copy of The Sixer in a year I'd of been a Cub Scout to help inspire those changes as I align to living by the spirit of scouting with stories and accounts of cub scout life.

One problem I have is in recent years there has been a pull toward altering characters in the storytelling and way they are drawn in a good many comics and even cartoons and this comes into the Beano which is something I always loved reading to meet modern ideas on how children should be treated, how they treat others in a very political correct way to the point Dennis doesn't menace anymore, the teachers aren't the authority figures at Bash Street School, Rodger's dodges are toned down and so on.

Instead I have decided to go back to an annual I almost certainly had first time round with those main characters being the boys and girls we loved, getting into scrapes, feeling the full power of the authority figures just as we did back then.
It featured cartoon strips from Tom, Dick and Sally, Babyface Finlayson, Lord Snooty and Biffo the Bear who were dropped later on but a part of my memory of reading the comic that came flooding back
It's smaller touches like Teacher carrying a cane in the Bash Street Kids, Roger the Dodger drawn having a spanking and a clear threat to in Dennis the Menace from his dad that reflected the life I and countless others had in 1974 and our cartoon and comic world reflected it.
It's not that I have an issue with new series reflecting today's society whatever one may think of that but it's remaking timeless series trying to tell us Dennis got married having a son called Dennis to justify these actions at the bequest of  social activists plus had Dennis Mk2 redrawn and behaving totally differently. It's like the story title may be the same but doesn't and isn't the same story any more.
I did have the Dandy current annual though that remains truer to its original form even if sadly the weekly paper comic is long gone as that is more a continuation of the past characters like Korky the cat and Desperate Dan with just the odd update.
Going back to go forward I had something else I had but in a slightly different form from those days.

Yes a new lego set rather than the old cardboard and plastic set I originally had with big boards plus french windows and doors although you can add to it as the box is pretty generous in size
I have had the odd kit since but the thing is those themed kits only make two or three things at the most  where as the classic lego I had  as a boy enabled you to make lots of different things from only being limited by your own imagination and running out of bits.

I did get this the bigger baseboard separately which isn't as chunky as the original but will do the job which will allow bigger things to be made and you can easily get another if needed. 
Mom got me some new grey knee length socks for my shorts too which is super awesome AND I wore my uniform with a grey jumper and tie with my folks while staying with them just like that boy always did.
As  you can imagine it was a just the kind of Christmas a ten year old me would of wanted and had the second time around.