For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for December 22, 2021

April is a born musician

This comic strip was originally published after Christmas in 1992, which is why April is already playing with a Christmas toy she got. They have shuffled them around so that the Christmas and Christmas Eve comic strips line up with the dates in 2021. Just pretend this is a toy that April already had.

One Christmas song of which I’ve vague childhood memories is “It Must Have Been the Mistletoe.”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs73lPNmdk0

I’m guessing that she means that by “don’t not make things like they used to” she wishes April’s toy would give too.

:-)

Time for the Battery-ek-tomy: Replace the batteries with Dead or weak batteries and hide all the new ones

There’s this one CD someone in my family has been playing, on repeat, for about a decade every single Christmas Eve. Over and over and over and over it must DIE!

My parents gave me a record player like that when I was young. The only song I remember was “Dixie”. I’m hardly southern (Philadelphia is the Deep South to me). But it’s still hard to get that song out of my mind.

You want an ear worm? Try watching two hours of “The Brady Bunch” every Sunday on MeTV!!

I don’t get it.

Someone gave our daughter a little toy “CD player”. That thing wouldn’t die & activated at the slightest provocation. We had upstairs neighbors who had very heavy feet & when they stomped across their living room, that stupid little toy would start to play! We “kindly” donated it to our church’s nursery. We noticed a few months later that it was gone. LOL

When our son was young, many of the electric toys that made noise were way over the top too loud. Some of the more obnoxious ones we just took the batteries out. Others were ok if you put stickers over the speaker areas.

At that age I was playing “In a Gadda Da Vida”. Don’t know if I harnessed any truth.

Give her a juice box and CIA the batteries backwards while she is distracted.

If we’re adding cars into the discussion – it’s a good thing that they don’t!

I remember when we passed the musical toys down to nieces, we were both so elated!!! :D We exchanged knowing glances with glee!

If this comic took place today, it would probably be baby shark.

Where is the reindeer or mother mouse stuffed toy that April was saying “want dat, want dat” incessantly from three days ago?

I’m guessing the song is Frosty the Snowman but what’s with all the dumpy dump dumps???

Buy cheap batteries.

Payback time, Helly!

When my oldest was about two my mother-in-law dug out all the old Shirley Temple 45s from the attic from when her kids were little, bought a Fisher Price record player for her first granddaughter, and fobbed them off on us. Of course one was a particular favorite, and I had to listen to it all. day. long. day after day. I was like, and what did I ever do to you, MomAmaryllis??

Even if the radio died, I doubt she would need the accompaniment.

Those look like VHS tapes, but they must be cassettes, given that it’s a song player. That’s cool, though—I didn’t know they had cassette players for little ones in the 90s. I wonder how durable they were. I received a hand-me-down walkman at some point (late 90s/early 00s)—pretty sure it was a cassette one, not a CD one.