Top Ten Christmas Gifts Of All Time: #9

Which of us haven’t had dreams that didn’t come true?

In the movie A Christmas Story Ralphie sits on the couch slack jawed, like a hound dog who’d lost his bone to the neighbor’s cat, thinking his dream of a Red Ryder had vanished like Santa up the chimney on Christmas Eve.

I have magnificent memories of the Christmas season in downtown Lima, Ohio; my hometown. It was a time before the malls were built and downtown even continued to have some appreciable life after the malls were built. When I think of how downtown Lima looked I think of the scene in It’s A Wonderful Life where George Bailey is running through Bedford Falls after God had given him a second chance in life. The snow is screaming and George is screaming “Merry Christmas” as he passes light posts and trees arrayed in Christmas lights.

Strings of Christmas lights ran along power lines that spanned the width and breadth of the square in Lima. A large plastic Santa in his sleigh with reindeer rode one of the power lines in front of the old Sigma Theater. I once saw the movie The Greatest Show On Earth at the Sigma; Jimmy Stewart played a clown on the lam in the movie with Charlton Heston and Betty Hutton. With the price of admission you received free popcorn and peanuts. By the late 60s or early 70s the Sigma was showing X-rated porn.

Santa, his team and Rudolph, perched on a power line were headed southbound on Main Street with an electric glow silhouetted against a black sky. The power poles were wrapped in garland and strung with lights; all very much like the opening scene in A Christmas Story where the boys are running to the toy store through downtown.

There’s a tiny town that sits at the intersection of State Route 33 and State Route 117 in northwest Ohio; Huntsville. I drove through Huntsville on Tuesday night of this week; the town has few Christmas lights, but they’re of the same vintage that Lima had in the 1960s. Reindeer hang from power lines and welcome you into the rural community; street light posts are bedecked with muted shimmering lanterns strung in garland; a piece of the past captured in time.

A large canvas tent was set up in the northwest quadrant of the square in downtown Lima where Santa would take up residence beginning the day after Thanksgiving. I stood in line with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other kids on those brisk days waiting to sit on Santa’s lap, tell him what I wanted for Christmas and receive a large chocolate coin wrapped in gold foil. It was all the stuff movies were made of.

Fifty feet away Santa was also sitting on the second floor of Jones’s Hardware listening to kids’ Christmas wishes as model trains roared around a track and clerks downstairs peddle snow shovels and pipe wrenches. That was some kind of magic act Santa could do, being in two places at one time.

A line of kids waiting to see Santa stretched north on Main Street until it was forced to turn west on High Street; the line seemed to not thin for hours. Sears and J.C. Penney were downtown, as were The Leader, Kerr’s Sporting Goods, J.J. Newberry’s and Three Sisters; all decorated for Christmas. But, my favorite store was Kresge’s that sat on the northwest corner of the intersection of High and Main Streets.

Kresge’s was a stone’s throw away from The Lima News building and was a favorite holiday haunt after my brothers and I would pay our weekly bill for the paper routes we had.

Kresge’s had display windows that rivaled the ones in A Christmas Story where Ralphie, Flick, Schwartz and Randy pressed their grimy noses to the glass and gawked at Lincoln Logs, toy soldiers, train sets, Snow White and of course the Red Ryder BB Gun. Pity the poor sap who had to clear kids’ boogers off those windows.

I was eleven years old and the previous summer it seemed like every kid on our dead end street had a bike except me. Etched in my memory is a bit of sullenness as I recall not being able to do what the other kids were doing because I didn’t have a bike. I remember feeling alone those days.

The day after Thanksgiving the Ohio Theater on West North Street would have a special event for kids while their parents shopped. For somewhere around 50 cents we were treated to 20+ Cartoons and Christmas features or featurettes. It was an all-day affair.

I recall seeing a movie there titled Santa Claus; it was a film from Mexico, dubbed in English, in which Santa battles the devil as he attempts to deliver Christmas presents on Christmas Eve. The Devil wages war against the spirits and minds of children to get them to do bad things; at one point, as Santa is making a delivery to a house, he shoots the devil in the butt with a pointed missile. It was incredibly cool to me back then. I found a copy of the movie on DVD in a close-out bin at K-Mart some years ago for $2.

Somehow, a couple of my brothers and I managed to have the money to participate. Popcorn was a dime a box and a cup of Coke was a nickel. Once the popcorn was gone we’d flatten the box and stealthily let it fly from the balcony, ever watchful of the ushers who were keeping an eye out for incorrigible brats like us. Somewhere, somebody’s probably got the scar from a gaping popcorn box wound on the back of their head today, having suffered a popcorn concussion.

After the movies we’d trek into Kresge’s and invaded the toy aisles. Shopping mother’s would have to elbow their way past me to look at the same toy soldiers that I had lined up on a shelf, where I dreamed of one day possessing them and carrying out magnificent battles. I never purchased any of the Romans and Vikings; I just played with them.

As we exited Kresge’s rear doors along High Street to head home in the late afternoon I noticed a bicycle in the display window. It was marvelous—an awesome green bike with groovy high handle bars, a groovier banana seat and green and white streamers coming from the hand grips. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I saw the price tag also–$20! Twenty bucks! It might as well have been twenty thousand bucks.

In that moment that bicycle became one of those unfulfilled dreams. There was no possible way my mom would ever be able to afford that for me as a Christmas gift. So I dreamed…

Like Ralphie, sometime between the day after Thanksgiving and Christmas Day, my mom asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I described for her the bicycle sitting in the window at Kresge’s. I can’t recall what she said, if anything.

I was perfectly content to settle for some toy soldiers; my mom would have gotten no complaints from me if that’s what was under the tree for me on Christmas morning. I guessed that it was going to be another summer of envy as I’d watch the neighbor kids tear by on their bikes.

The thought of getting that bicycle was such a stretch for me that I don’t think I ever seriously thought I would have it. I don’t know that I thought about it again after initially telling my mom about it when she asked what I’d like for Christmas. It would have been akin to Donna Reed, as Mary Hatch, asking Jimmy Stewart’s character, George Bailey to lasso the moon for her in It’s A Wonderful Life.

The weeks crawled by leading up to Christmas.

Most nights after dinner I’d head out into the darkness with a couple of neighbor kids and we’d sled down the hill that led to the railroad tracks we lived next to. On those evenings distant train whistles would sound somewhere east of town and echo through the stillness of the snow falling. That sound of train whistles is still one of my favorite sounds in the world.

Those same bleak winter’s nights the Greer family just across the street from us would pipe Christmas music outdoors; the faint sound of carols bounced off the houses to serenade us.

Our ramshackle house had a basement that seemed more like a dungeon. The front part of the basement held our washer and dryer; it seemed to always be cold, dank and wet. The stairwell was probably a place where ogres lived who ate little kids, so I avoided it.

The back part of the basement had a central room where our behemoth furnace sat; beyond the furnace was a crawl space that I never, ever ventured into the entire sixteen years I lived there. Off to one side of the central room sat an old coal bin. There were many times I shoveled coal from the delivery truck into the basement bin, and then shoveled a second time in the bin to move it closer to the furnace.

A week or so before Christmas I was bored; really bored. I was so bored that I found myself wandering in the basement just to keep the boredom from overwhelming me.

While traipsing around in the coal bin I discovered a large cardboard box. What the heck? I thought to myself; what’s this and what is it doing down here. I didn’t recognize the box and initially thought it was something my dad had bought; you know, something like drywall or tools or a new set of shovels to shovel coal.

I circled the box like somebody’s granddad kicking the tires on an Edsel before buying it. I even managed to pull the box away from the wall it was leaning against. Unbelievable!

There it was—the bike from Kresge’s sitting in my basement!

Santa had done the impossible—how he…errr…she… pulled it off I’ve never known.

I asked my mom this week how she ever managed to buy Christmas presents for us; she couldn’t remember; Alzheimer’s has robbed her of those memories. But she did say, “I probably started buying things in July.”

I never let on to my mom that I’d seen the box with the bike in it before Christmas, and Christmas morning I acted as though I was surprised out of my mind. Truth be told, I really was; It didn’t take much effort to show it.

I rode that bike with the other kids that summer, and the next, and more summers after that. At fourteen I extended the fork on the bike, bought a sissy bar and sort of thought of myself as a junior Hells Angel.