Biographical memory organizes its memories around temporal, spatial and emotional clues which, once reactivated, will sometimes allow the reconstruction of a single memory. This is the case with Christmas, all the big family dinners and parcel-opening ceremonies, on New Year’s Eve or Christmas morning, more often than not they become a personal semantics.
Sometimes a precise episode stands out and is reached at this time of year. How many comedy films have built their success on the day of a Christmas disaster among the guests that remains forever and makes someone lose their taste for the holidays!
The repertoire of biographical memory is made up of themes (holidays, work, family reunion) and periods (end of year celebrations). Collective memory is sometimes a way of dating periods of our personal recollections by relating them to events in public life (getting married at the same time as a celebrity, moving or starting a new job during a presidential election).
The most general index is that of the decades, 60s, 70s,…, 2000s. Even though our personal memory is individualized, it uses the indices provided by the collective memory, to
consolidate.
In neurology, tests have been developed to evaluate the memory of famous people or public events that can be experienced by patients with retrograde memory retrieval difficulties, sometimes over several decades.
Every decade has its gift memories
Christmas gives us the opportunity to realize how much the consumer items that arrive under the tree are dated and are, in a certain sense, clues to date our memories. Some toys have an exceptional vitality such as the Monopoly game whose objective is to ruin its opponents which has persisted and been renewed since the 1930s.
You must have been born in the 1960s (this can represent three generations of a family) to play Barbie. Marketed in 1959, it is less popular than in the 90s but is always reinventing itself! The best selling doll is blonde but since 1967 she has been experimenting with diversity and since the 1980s all ethnicities have been produced.
From the beginning she practiced all professions: dancer or doctor! In 2015, a commercial shows a child playing with a Barbie for the first time.
Finally, Barbie’s contemporary Lego pieces continue their worldwide success and since 2018 are made of vegetable plastic (sugar cane) maintaining the same power of fun and creativity.
How many vinyls, CDs, cassettes have been dropped into Christmas shoes, now replaced by a subscription to a music streaming platform (music streaming)? And how many record players, record players, CD players, walkmans and telephones accompanied them?
Some people have never known the disc eater or tac tac and are puzzled as to what these things are! Others are too old to have received the darling from Corolle or Pokémon, or even the ingenious Polly Pocket, with glued feet and colored hair who fit in their pockets with their pink and purple boxes and accessories for the most part. !
Small quiz to test your gift knowledge
What gift was given in 1950, 1960, etc.
And which of you received something for Christmas?
● A digital camera
● A record player
● A Polaroid camera
● Sophie the giraffe
● The Poppies vinyl record
● A game The Cluedo
● A connected watch
● Dear child
● A transistor radio
● A Walkman
● A Polly Pocket
● A Pokémon figure
● A disk feeder
● The first generation Gameboy
● Chocolates
Answers:
1950 = A Le Cluedo game; a transistor radio –
1960 = Sophie the giraffe; a record eater –
1970 = The Poppies vinyl record; a Polaroid camera –
1980 = Dear Child; Walkman –
1990 Polly Pocket; the first generation Gameboy –
2000 = A Pokemon figure; a digital camera –
2010 = A connected watch –
2021 A vintage record player (the first model marketed in the 70s);
As for the chocolates… it always works!