CHRISTMAS PAST

Can you remember when you were a child anticipating Christmas?
The anxiety, the joy, the waiting, wondering if it would ever get here.

When my brother, sister and I were young, we waited for the Sears Roebuck Christmas catalog to arrive.
We then pored over it for days, choosing what we wanted Santa to bring us.

Of course my sister and I would pick the most beautiful dolls and my brother would opt for the flashiest truck or car.
Then we would write our letters to Santa with all of our requests.

Two weeks before Christmas my Mom would bring out her scrawny, little table tree with the pointed lights. The unique thing about these lights were if one bulb burned out the whole string went dark. What fun it was screwing and unscrewing bulb after bulb until the culprit was found. Luckily there were only about fifteen or twenty bulbs to a string.

Mom would spend those weeks baking fruitcake, assorted breads and batch after batch of cookies. We were the official tasters. We got to eat the broken ones. Yummy.

Several days before Christmas, Dad would haul in the big platform and fresh tree. He put them in place and then put up the tracks for his Lionel trains. We were kept occupied playing with the trains. I can still smell the smoke from the locomotive. Oh, wait, I think that smoke is coming from my husband's trains.

The tree wasn't decorated until Christmas Eve, while we were asleep and the Plastic-ville town appeared as well.

Christmas morning we would get up early and wake our parents, who probably just got to sleep. They went to Christmas Candlelight Service at church at 11:00 PM and then trimmed the tree and put out the gifts.

Our gifts were never wrapped in Christmas paper. Remember this was the 40's and 50's, we weren't affluent. Even though there were no tags on the gifts, somehow we knew which pile was ours.

My sister and I received dolls, a book, and clothes which included a blouse or sweater, socks and always underwear. Mom was very practical.

My brother received a car or truck, a book, and clothes also.

There was always a large box of Crayola crayons which was to be shared by the three of us. Remember those boxes of 64 crayons with all the neat exotic names?

Each of our stockings held an orange in the toe, some assorted nuts, candy and maybe small items like a toothbrush, or comb, etc.

Usually the gifts we had picked out of the Sears catalogue weren't there.
But you know, that didn't matter to us. We were thrilled with whatever we received.

What about your memories of Christmas past, were they good ones?
Are there some you can re-create for your children?