15 Musical Christmas Gifts Everyone Got In the ’80s and ’90s

Back when Amazon was just a rainforest and the word "iPod" sounded like a one-man spacecraft, people still got musical gifts for Christmas.

In fact, you could argue (and we already did) that thanks or no thanks to technology, we actually buy far fewer music-related gifts than we used to. But during the '80s and '90s, when it took so much work to hear new albums and it was much more expensive to buy all the necessary audio components, Christmas often provided an annual upgrade to a kid's entire musical experience.

In the spirit of that twinkling nostalgia, we've assembled this list of musical gifts that often found their way under Christmas trees back then. While it's probably depressing to any one-time owners of chain record stores, it's only slightly less depressing to parents who once paid $399 for a portable CD player.