Christmas is a time for family, food, fun, football, and a passing interest in the Queen’s speech. However old and crotchety you get, though, one of the main attractions is presents. From the satisfaction of a gift well received to the excitement of getting something you wanted (or didn’t know you wanted), gifts are part and parcel of the Christmas experience.
While the biggest danger any of us have to worry about is a bit of well-masked disappointment, Christmas hasn’t always been quite so safe. Here’s our rundown of the most dangerous Christmas gifts ever popularised, from seemingly innocuous toys to borderline illegal activities.
WW1 relief packages
What to buy a downtrodden soldier in the freezing much of the Somme? While most soldiers in the First World War would have been happy with coffee, chocolate and cigarettes, a more unusual gift also proved popular. Wealthy relatives in the vicinity of Harrods, the famed London department store, could get their hands on kits full of cocaine and heroin.
The lavish gift boxes – containing elegant holders for syringes, needles and drug vials – were a popular Christmas gift in the early years of the War, and often handed to departing soldiers by their spouses. After a press campaign suggested they were lowering the performance of British soldiers – and may have been deliberately planted by Germany – the sale of non-prescription drugs to soldiers was banned in 1916.
Hoverboards
From the distant past to the far-flung future – or so you would think. When hoverboards became a brief craze in 2016, most people imagined the sci-fi variety: boards that actually hovered. Yet the hoverboards that made their way into homes across the world were more like motorised skateboards, with one wheel on each end.
This disappointment might explain why the fad faded as quickly as it appeared. A contributing factor, however, was how dangerous they were. This wasn’t just because they were difficult to control, but because the rush for production saw the market flooded with low quality products – some of which contained exploding batteries.
Gilbert U-283 Atomic Energy Lab
The A.C. Gilbert Company was one of the premier toy makers of the 20th century. Founded by Olympian and inventor Alfred Carlton Gilbert, the company was renowned for its educational toy sets, designed to encourage boys into various career tracks. Gilbert’s most famous creation, the Erector Set, is still sold under the Meccano brand today.
One of his lesser-known and less popular toys would be enough to put you on several watchlists today. The U-283 Atomic Energy Lab contained several samples of uranium ore, along with other radioactive materials. Designed with help from people who worked on the Manhattan Project, the effects of the radiation were likely equivalent to a day in the sun – a fact that probably won’t be enough to bring it back into production.
CSI: Lab Kits
While product standards are distinctly safer today, the odd dangerous toy still slips through the net. Such was the case with the CSI: Fingerprint Examination and CSI: Investigation Forensics Lab Kits. Designed for pint-sized crime solvers, both kits included a dust (possibly talcum powder) which could be used to dust for fingerprints.
Whatever the dust was, the unfortunate result of actual lab testing showed that it contained as much as 7% tremolite. A common contaminant in talc, tremolite is a form of asbestos, and carries all of the dangers we frequently cover on this blog. With the potential to cause incurable cancers, the product was sensibly removed from shelves in the not-so-distant year of 2007.
Gilbert Glass Blowing Kit
When we said the A.C. Gilbert Company made educational toys, we may have excluded a bit of context. As well as jobs generally being less safe in the mid 20th century, the safety of children was less of a consideration. If you wanted your child to get into a respectable career like glass blowing (or chemistry, where you often had to make your own test tubes), what better way to encourage them than actually doing it?
The glass blowing kit included a small bunsen burner and a series of tools to shape the provided glass, including a pipe through which you could blow ‘glass bubbles’. For anyone who may have been wondering, the point at which glass softens is somewhere between 600°C and 700°C – a fact that didn’t stop the manual from advising that children rotate a glass tube over the flame to shape it with their hands.
Gilbert Kaster Kit Jr
The third appearance of the A.C. Gilbert Company on this list, the Kaster Kit Jr was a bad idea both for obvious and less well-appreciated reasons. Another educational toy, this example encouraged young boys to make their own toy soldiers – by casting them with molten metal. If that didn’t raise enough red flags, the metal in question was lead.
Initially done by scooping the molten lead into metal moulds, later editions (advertised as “absolutely safe!”) used an open-topped machine to pour the lead for you. Either way, you’d end up with a small army of lead infantry, cavalry and vehicles – all of which would give you lead poisoning, and lead to permanent brain damage.
Lawn darts
Lots of sports and activities involve a small element of risk. Running, jumping and throwing are all kinetic, and it’s this energy and effort that makes them exciting. But there is a line between the potential for minor injury and the likelihood of severe injury, and lawn darts are about a mile past that line.
A lawn game that was mysteriously marketed to children in the 1970s and 80s, these metal tipped darts were meant to be thrown vertically and embed themselves in the grass. Instead, they often embedded themselves in people. Several deaths of children were attributed to the toy, leading to a complete ban in the United States and Canada (but notably, not in Europe).
Toothpick crossbows
Modern product standards tend to be high enough that extremely dangerous toys, devices and appliances don’t make it to market. The notable exception is in China, where manufacturers are constantly pumping out items that make their way onto internet marketplaces worldwide without sufficient safety checks. This idea however is less a normal product with a safety flaw, and more an obvious safety nightmare.
Unsurprisingly popular with young people, the toothpick crossbow is exactly what it sounds like: a small mechanical device that fires toothpicks or other projectiles. Propelling them at velocities apparently high enough to pierce soda cans, the Chinese government quickly acted to ban the instruments of terror after they became a short lived seasonal craze.