Last Sunday I had to give a talk and in part of my talk I mentioned my memories of the day I left home at 17 to fly from Tennessee to Utah where I would be attending college at BYU. I shared how I remembered sitting on the airplane listening to music off a cassette tape on my Walkman…just thinking about it made me realize how crazy is it that my grandkids won’t have any concept of a what a cassette tape or a Walkman is?!  My own kids barely know what those are!!

I miss so many of those things from the 80s!  I miss those cassette tapes and the Walkman. And I still remember how excited I was when they first started releasing blank cassette tapes that you could use to record your own mix tapes on. Before they came out with those we’d have to use a piece of tape to cover the little holes on the top of the cassette to get it to let us record on it. But when the blank cassettes came out it was so exciting!  I would sit up in my room with my boombox and I’d wait for the top 40 songs to get played on the radio so I could hurry up and hit record on my favorite songs to make a mix tape. I loved making those mix tapes – I had the Happy Mix Tape with songs like Walking on Sunshine by Katrina and the Waves, and I had the Slow Dance Mix Tape with With or Without You by U2, I remember the summer before college I created a ST MOB Mix Tape which embarrassingly stood for Songs To Make-Out By (…my poor parents…) – I remember it had the I Melt With You by Modern English and Forever by Kenny Loggins…ahhh…the memories….80s music was simply the best.

And TV shows in the 80s were fantastic. The Greatest American Hero, the A Team, Knight Rider, Magnum PI, the Fall Guy, Chips, Silver Spoons, the Dukes of Hazzard, Remington Steele, Mork and Mindy…just to name a few…

We didn’t have cell phones so we’d talk for hours on the LAN line and you’d have to drag the phone cord under the closet door so you could talk in private, but you’d have to listen carefully to hear a click on the phone so you would know if your brothers picked up the phone in another room to listen in on your call.

I could go on and on about everything I loved about the 80s, from the fashion to the insane amount of hairspray we used, to Pac Man and Donkey Kong, to watermelon jolly ranchers and Fun Dip…the 80s were just good times…

One idea that could be fun to consider when you are picking out Christmas gifts this year is to get people presents from the era they grew up in to bring little nostalgia back into their lives.

That’s it! I’ve got the perfect gift for my husband..I’ll make him a ST MOB cassette tape mix for Christmas 😉  tee hee

~Amy Rees Anderson