The Ghosts of Christmas Past

Merry Christmas to you and yours, and Happy Hannukah too. At my house the presents have been opened, breakfast eaten, coffee drank and we are on the second or third replay of "A Christmas Story." I love that movie starring Darren McGavin. McGavin was one of my favorite stars; he portrayed characters that were kind of gruff and no-nonsense at times, always a bit funny, having to deal with strange problems that were usually of his own making. He died in 2006, I'm sorry to say.

"A Christmas Story" evokes memories of my own childhood and Christmases past, as it is set in the 1940's (my memories start about 1948) and so much is familiar. We didn't have a TV set because they weren't commercially available yet. Our Christmases in Clovis, New Mexico and Joplin, Missouri were white ones. It was always exciting when the first snowflakes began to fall. I used to sit in front of the living room window and watch the delicate flakes come down.

There was a year when Bro and I got BB guns for Christmas. We were outside in the front yard of our Missouri apartment house shooting a milk bottle into shards when a police car pulled up. The old goat across the street claimed he had been hit by a ricochet. The liar. That was no ricochet. (We were just testing the range of the BB guns, who would have guessed they could shoot that far?) The cops talked to our parents and were soon gone and we were soon back to ambushing milk bottles.

Yes, people often warned us that we "would shoot your eye out," and frankly, it's a miracle we didn't. Bro did shoot me in the eye once with a bow and arrow, but the arrow had a suction cup where an arrowhead would normally go, so I escaped the assault with only a shiner. Our father broke the bows and arrows over his knee so we were soon forced to deal with mandatory disarmament. There's a lesson in there someplace for modern Iran, I think.

In those days kids like us hoped for cap guns, cowboy hats, watches, pocket knives, a new bike, BB guns, bows and arrows, toy cars made out of cast iron, sling shots and other weapons of mass destruction. It was a pretty dangerous time, completely politically incorrect and loads of fun. There was little about those gifts that could be called electronic. No high-tech stuff at all.

Looking back, my favorite Christmas gifts of childhood were my first bike (it had training wheels) and 3 or 4 years later, a Jerry Mahoney ventriloquist dummy. It's hard to imagine the kind of joy I felt then when I received those gifts. There is nothing I want that dearly today. Well, a new dual core laptop with wide screen would be nice and a carved string bass to replace my laminate would be nice. I still have my toys, they are just more expensive.