Flying? We were solid middle class in the 80s and my first plane flight wasn't until 2001 (and then only because I was away at college and my mother had died suddenly). My parents hadn't flown since the 70s (before my sister and I were born), and even then, that was a rare thing for them.
Our childhood vacations were single-day (so we didn't have to pay for a hotel) road trips to a nearby state to go to an amusement park, or multi-day trips (also within driving distance) where my dad had to go somewhere for work and the hotel was paid for by his employer. It was a huge huge deal for us when, in the late 90s, we drove down to Disney World (a 13-hour drive) for a several-day trip.
And we never traveled around Christmas; that was one of the most expensive times of the year to travel!
Not sure when or where you grew up, but most middle-class folks in the US in the 80s didn't have a lot of discretionary income, and flights were (inflation adjusted) quite a bit more expensive than they are today.
I suspect your family was not as middle class as you think it was. You're describing a very similar childhood to what I had in the late 80s, but we were lower class for sure
I'm not saying that middle class families flew all the time in the 80s, but they absolutely could afford to if they wanted to make it a priority
A cursory google search seems to bear this out. Cheap flights in north america started in 1978 with some air travel deregulation.
GP claims their family was lower middle class not properly middle class. My family mostly traveled like kelnos family did at the time. Also gas prices in the 80s-90s were so cheap that it rarely made sense to fly over driving. We flew as a family twice as a kid because we were an immigrant family and we saved up to visit the country of origin but it was ridiculously expensive to take the whole family, so dad stayed home one vacation, and we always stayed there with family.
We did have a computer but it was really a one time expense. At the time computers were improving quickly so I scavenged parts which wealthy areas that threw last Gen hardware away but were better than what we had (and I was a kid with a lot of time on my hands.) Giving a computer to a kid for Christmas in '83 is a very different value proposition than even a family vacation because a vacation is something the whole family does.
My family was working class not even lower middle class.
And even we flew a few times in the late 80s early 90s, and we had a (probably used) Tandy computer that hooked up to the living room TV.
People have different priorities. We certainly couldn’t have afforded a current generation top of the line computer, and we couldn’t have flown every year. But an older computer and the occasional flight were firmly attainable to anyone with stable job if they really wanted them.
Yes, obviously a Tandy or C64 in 1990 is different, but anyway this thread is beating a dead horse. I regret even starting it. It's the kind of off-topic nonsense that HN is filled with these days.
What, like a yearly vacation? Maybe they stayed home for Christmas one year instead of flying to visit family