Forty hours of blank tape was the best Christmas present I'd ever got

I had no idea what I was going to do with 40 hours of blank video tape, but I was pretty sure this was the best goddamn Christmas present I had ever received in my entire young life.

When it comes to presents from Santa, there had been a few crackers in my childhood - some wonderful slot car sets, the occasional beloved Star Wars figure, some Fighting Fantasy books that got heavy use and my wonderful Grifter bicycle - but the 10 four-hour blank video tapes I got for Christmas 1988 was something special.

Blank tapes were a very important part of my life for several years. They were expensive as hell, and I made the absolute most out of every minute.  Most of them were three hours long, which was slightly frustrating when I couldn't quite get two films on a tape. 

Sometimes you'd fit two on perfectly - I did get both Bill & Teds and two Texas Chainsaw Massacres into the 180 minutes, with minutes to spare - but even if I couldn't get two films, I used up all the space with treasured episodes of TV shows and music videos.

And then it's 1988 and I was 13 and my big Christmas present for the year was a small box filled with 10 E-240 tapes. And even though I was going through the usual teenage dramas, this was proof that my parents still knew me, because this felt like a gift from heaven.  

Just a few years earlier I was spending all my Christmas money on a $15 blank tape because Star Wars was playing for the first time on TV, and I could tape it and watch it as many times as I liked, something that had been unimaginable for much of my childhood. While they were steadily getting cheaper - you could get tapes for $5.99 at the DEKA store in town - I still only had half a dozen tapes of my own when I suddenly had 40 hours to fill.

It took me a few months, but I soon managed to get copies of the best films in the world onto those tapes. With ample room for two films on every tape, I could get my own copies of 20 films, an unimaginably large amount for my young cinematic tastes. 

Most of them I taped off the TV - Psycho was one of the first films to get recorded - and then we somehow ended up with two VCR machines, and I could make my own copies of anything at the video store, and might have gone a bit crazy.

There have been several generations of new entertainment technology come and go since then, but I still have a couple of those long tapes, and the capacity to play them. I have those films in far greater quality, but there is a comfort in the warm fuzz of video tape, back when everything wasn't so sharp, and when a pile of blank tape was everything.