Top Ten Christmas Gifts Of All Time: #10

At nine years old I lived with my family in a tiny house that sat on a dead end street next to a railroad track. I still believed in Santa; all the haters had not infected my juvenile brain yet with the wild idea that Santa wasn’t real, and, that the gifts you received really came from your parents. Humph!

I believed in the magic of Christmas and Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. Oh, by the way, I watched Rudolph on TV last Tuesday night. To me, there’s something about Rudolph that feels like a North Carolina beach on Memorial Day—warm, soothing and languid.

I was thirteen the first time I missed watching Rudolph on TV—I went roller skating with my buddies that year at the Lima Roller Rink on West Market Street in Lima—it was a Saturday night and I had to choose between watching Rudolph and watching girls; I chose watching the girls.

The Lima Roller Rink sat on the third floor of an office building with a parking garage on the second floor. We’d climb the ramp leading up to the parking garage, maneuver our way up a tightly winding set of stairs to a rickety ticket booth cloaked in a shroud of dust being kicked up from the wax on the rink floor. I wonder if anybody ever died of “wax lung disease?” After paying admission and skate rental our eyes would scan the place for neophyte pixies, sort of like a U-boat Commander scanning the horizon for an oil tanker to torpedo in the Atlantic during WWII.

The evening became a game of hide-n –seek; girls would hide from us as we would seek them; we weren’t a very desirable lot of ragamuffins.

It seemed to snow more during December when I was nine years old. It seemed like snow fell by the foot back then; back when our neighbor, Dwight, would plow our street with a backhoe he’d borrowed from his company and pile the white stuff 10-12 feet high over top the guard rail that kept one’s car from plunging into the abyss known as the Pennsylvania Railroad at the end of our street.

I have lasting memories of trudging thru knee-high snow to walk to school at Franklin Elementary and Faurot Elementary. A “snow day” was unheard of back then.

My dad had this saying that we had gone “Christmas Happy” about the time we put the Christmas tree up and decorated it each year; he left that to my mom and us kids to do.

Not too many years earlier my family had received Christmas baskets and even a Christmas tree from The Salvation Army. We were pitifully poor; my mother worked as a maid at for a dollar an hour to support our family of eight; my dad was disabled and didn’t work.

As such, Christmas really was magical to me, and going “Christmas Happy” was somewhat of an escape from the real world in which we lived in our dilapidated house on Washington Street.

We were never allowed to open Christmas presents before Christmas morning, which resulted in some terribly sleepless nights for my parents as six kids squirmed the night away, sending the youngest into my parent’s bedroom multiple times throughout the night to ask if we could get up and open presents. The youngest was kind of like a point man in the jungles of Vietnam; if anybody was going to take one for the greater group it was going to be the youngest.

Finally, sometime around 6:30am my parents would capitulate, give up on getting any sleep, and allow us to get up to open presents.

My dad was depicted perfectly in the movie A Christmas Story in the character of Ralphie’s dad—you know, the cussing feared furnace fighter. A fire would have to be built in our coal-burning furnace; the house would have to warm up somewhere north of, say, 65 degrees, to a temperature where our toes didn’t curl due to the cold floor. We’d have to line up at the threshold of our living room like runners readying themselves for the launch of the New York City Marathon.

The tension was so thick that we nearly peed ourselves, dancing, waiting, begging, and pleading with my dad to let us into the living room where the tree and presents were. I think my old man took some kind of demented pleasure in drawing the whole thing out. It all was reminiscent of the scene in A Christmas Story where Ralphie locks himself in the bathroom to use his Little Orphan Annie Secret Decoder and Randy was outside the bathroom door in a panic, needing to use the toilet.

Once my dad had said “go” it was like Wal-Mart on Black Friday; a cross between a stampede and a mad dash, with elbows flying as we nearly knocked one another over scrambling to the tree—forget “shooting your eye out”, we came close to losing an eye just to get at the tree.

Most Christmases I was like Ralphie, in that all I really wanted for Christmas was one thing—and I’d take as much of that one thing that my parents wanted to get me—and that one thing was…toy soldiers.

I think I lived in my own little dimension for several years, creating worlds of warfare, playing god, deciding who died and who lived. For some reason I often allowed the villains to win; the Confederates over the Yankees, the Germans over the Allies and Indians over Cowboys. I don’t know why, it just felt right.

Christmas paper rained down in our living room as though it fell from the sky like a ticker tape parade in Manhattan on VJ Day. I well remember all the gifts being opened then sitting on our dining room floor eating a tangerine and enraptured by a box sitting in front of me. “Castle Attack!”

Sweet Mother of All That’s Good and Pure I thought!

A box full of gold bullion wrapped with a bow couldn’t have compared to the playset.

I think my mom may have seen me looking at the playset at McCrory’s five and dime in the American Mall one day while we were out shopping. The American Mall now sits empty and dark with the ghosts of Christmases past still roaming its corridors and toy playset waiting to jump off the shelves into the arms of nine year old boys.

The playset was beautiful! A plastic, medieval gray castle with a working drawbridge and catapults and crossbows that actually fired! The playset came with an assortment of knights in black, gray and red; some swung maces, others were archers, some carried pikes—all, ready for battle.

I spent hours devising epic struggles with stout crossbow arrows buffeting the castle walls and door, knights falling off the castle walls as archers pierced them and the smell of tangerine on my fingers as the house quieted with siblings retreating to their own corners to revel in their gifts.

I had the feeling that morning that Ralphie experienced as he lay in his bed at the end of A Christmas Story, cradling his Red Ryder as he slept. All was right with the world.

Many, many years later I would buy one of those castle playsets off Ebay, and my son of nine and I would play for endless hours, creating great battles, the ones in which he always won.