A brief yet vaguely amusing anecdote with a minor point at the end

So I was six or seven and I believed in Santa Claus. He lives at the North Pole and he makes toys, right? That's what he does. He MAKES those sumbitches. So my assumption, naturally, was that you could just ask for whatever you could think of and Santa would just cobble it together for you. And what I wanted was "a remote-controlled helicopter for Georgie." 'Georgie' was the brand-name (I think) for a particular stuffed monkey that was very popular at my school at the time. And so I wanted a helicopter that he could fly around in at my behest. "Does such a thing exist?" my parents asked dubiously. "Santa can build it," I patiently explained to them. I mean, duh. This isn't rocket science.

I don't remember much of a sense of disappointment when this contrivance failed to materialize under the tree. Perhaps at some level I knew that it wasn't really a feasible request. Still, I wonder how often kids do that--ask for imaginary gifts. You'd think it would be a common phenomenon, but you (by which I mean, I) never hear about it. Are children's imaginations really so stunted by barrages of advertising that it never even occurs to them that there could be anything beyond what the teevee bombards their eyeballs with? A dismaying thought.