Christmas snow globe 2...

So, what was your favourite Happy Meal toy? I think most people at some time have had a Happy Meal and some of the toys in them are really, really good. But my second Christmas snow globe didn't come with a happy meal and as far as I'm aware McD's have never given away snow globes in Happy Meals.

This globe is pretty rare, they only made five hundred and were sold directly from McDonald's Corporate - so how one ended up in a discount shop in Altrincham is a little bit of a puzzle. I bought it in the late eighties for three pounds. What attracted me to it, apart from the fact that I was snow globe crazy at that time, was the really good quality of the thing. The base is wood, the figures well modelled, and it’s a musical globe. The music box plays "Jingle Bells" and as it plays the tree inside rotates around to show the all characters around the tree. The snow inside is iridescent, so it’s a quite nice thing if you ignore the fact it celebrates Macdonalds.

I didn’t know who the characters were when I bought it, no that’s not quite true, I did recognise Ronald McDonald, but not Hamburglar, Grimace (the purple monster), Birdie the Early Bird, and two of the Fry Kids – a girl and a boy I guess as one is blue and the other pink. They’re wearing skates and look for all the world like they have been backed up against the tree and are surrounded by something hostile – red Indians, a pack of wolves, or maybe a group of vegetarians.

I knew it was a bargain the moment I clapped eyes on it and my only regret is that I didn’t but the other two that were in the shop. A snow globe just like mine in its original box sold for $265 last year on e-bay. There are a lot of serious collectors of McDonarebelia. They are happy to pay quite a lot of money for rarities. Happy meal toys are very collectable with some of the rarer ones selling for hundreds of pounds.

Sometimes I worry that I may have thrown out a fortune clearing the back seat of my car when Holly was younger – I definitely threw away some Dalmations which can fetch up to $50 a pup, a complete set will fetch as much as $5,000.

So, what was my favourite happy meals toy? Easy - my Bugs Bunny Superman