Christmas Memories When it comes to Christmas and the holidays it seems there is never enough time to do what we have to, to make the holidays a success. If you have a large family, you have to make sure everyone gets a present and no one is left out, especially a child. When it comes to shopping there is always some special toys you are asked for which seem impossible to get. It always amazed me that somehow, I was always able to succeed with these tasks. Things are a lot easier today than they were when I had young children. One of the best features of the internet is you can find almost anything in the stores there. You also get a better description of the things you want to buy. In the old days you went to a toy store or large department store, and looked at a box trying to decide what was entailed with the purchase. I am talking about having to put toys together. I have had some harrowing experiences in the past with this as I am sure some are still having today, though not as much. I used to wait to Christmas Eve when the children were asleep to put the toys together. One of the toys was a simple metal red wagon. You know the type, you pull it as the kids sit in it and it can be steered because the two front wheels turn. It was called the Radio Flyer. What could have been easier to assemble than that? A wagon body, an axel and four wheels with hub caps? It turned out almost anything was easier. The problem was someone at the factory forgot to drill a couple of holes where they were needed for assembly. They should have been in the body of the wagon which was thick metal. It might have been ok if I would have had an electric drill, but at the time I had nothing and it was too late to buy a drill. Profusely sweating from nerves because I wanted the kids to get this present, I tried to hammer a substantial nail through the metal body to make a hole. After hammering for a couple of hours I finally did it and miraculously didn’t damage the wagon. I will always remember the toy I thought the kids would really love. You have to remember this was way before computers were common. It was a miniature bowling alley. Nowhere on the box did it say assembly needed, so I bought it. I decided to look at it on Christmas Eve and I almost had a heart attack. There weren’t two pieces together in the box and to make matters worse there were all sorts of tiny springs which had to carefully be placed in unattainable positions. I tried for hours to get this together, but unfortunately some areas were so tiny there was no way my hands could get to them. This was one toy I had to return. Christmas certainly is not all about toys however. It is about being thankful, helping others less fortunate than ourselves and showing your family how much you love them. When I was first married, I was in the US Army and my wife and I lived on a base in New Jersey. We always were lucky enough to make it back home for the holidays. That was one of the perks of being stationed in the US. My entire family would get together for Christmas dinner which included about twenty relatives and sometimes friends. It was always a great time. They are mostly all gone now, but not forgotten. One Christmas we did our usual thing, had a big Christmas dinner and big glasses of eggnog. You would think when food goes bad you would be able to tell, but this is not always the case. It turned out the eggnog was bad and you have never seen so many people so sick. I can tell you this I have never felt that bad before or since. Everyone was throwing up for days and had many other uncomfortable things happening to them. That was it for eggnog for many years after that. You check the dates and think everything is fine because the expiration date is far in the future, but sometimes that doesn’t mean anything, because if the product was left out for too long before being refrigerated after delivery, it can turn and for some reason this batch of eggnog tasted okay. My mother used to tell me a Christmas story which upset her. It had to do with the fact kids in my time were always taken to see Santa Claus. Every department store had him sitting up on his throne chair with a long line of kids waiting to get their chance to climb up on his lap and tell him what they wanted for Christmas. One day my mother took me to see Santa and we were on the usual long line and it took about 30 minutes for me to get to him. I climbed up on his lap, but my mother said I noticed something strange about him and pulled his beard. It turned out Santa was a woman and I got upset and so did my mother. In those days when you were a little kid you felt like you had been lied to and this wasn’t really Santa. There were a lot of incredible Christmas toy displays which were sponsored by the big department stores such as Macys, Bloomingdales and FAO Schwartz. There would be huge electric train displays with the engines puffing out smoke and speeding down the track and stopping at the stations. Large animated statues of Santa and his elves were everywhere and there were even some toy demonstrations going on in some stores. Most of these displays were not only inside the stores but also in the windows and I remember watching them with lots of other kids. We just all stood there fascinated, impervious to the weather outside, until our parents said it was time to go. You could have heard a pin drop. Today we have television, something I didn’t have as a child. With it a new Christmas tradition has come along and it is the Christmas movie. That is the movie many people watch every year around Christmas time. There are now several and some of the most famous ones are “It’s A Wonderful Life”, “A Christmas Story”, “Miracle On 34th Street”, and others. They are great holiday movies, and I can understand the tradition of watching them every year, but I have a hard time with one tradition and that is watching the Yule Log on television for hours at a time. Christmas is still a great time for the family to get together.
|
