CHILDHOOD CHRISTMAS.
I begin with smoke. Lots of smoke. During the winter holidays our house on 19th avenue southeast in Minneapolis was filled with gregarious relatives and friends. My parents kept open house during much of December. And almost every adult smoked. The only adult I ever remember who didn’t smoke was my grandma Daisy. Everyone else puffed away like a chimney. Even after the surgeon general’s report in 1964. December in Minnesota is decidedly cold, so windows stayed shut. The pall of cigarette smoke on some days could almost be felt. My mother believed that burning a single bayberry candle on the coffee table in the living room would ‘eat up’ the smoke, clearing the atmosphere. She was wrong. My brother Bill, me, and my sisters Sue Ellen and Linda have always had weak lungs as a result of all that second hand smoke. Every winter when we were kids we came down with croup and bronchitis. Sore throats were the norm; coming home from grade school, just a block away, and rushing to one of the hot air registers to gulp down drafts of hot air to soothe my raw aching throat.
My mother was a dab hand with spritz cookies. And she kept a rack full of toppings just for these beauties. Chocolate sprinkles. Cinnamon drops. Glazed walnuts. Candied citrus peel. Chopped dates. Silver dragees (tiny balls of sugar coated with silver food coloring – i thought they were real metal and warned my gullible younger cousins not to bite into one lest they crack a tooth.) jordan almonds. Nonpareils. Dabs of fig jam. New England jimmies. Toasted coconut. Marshmallow cream.
And on the coffee table, next to the ineffectual bayberry candle there was always a cut glass dish filled with ribbon hard candy. Very colorful. But a pretty lame sweet. I don’t think anyone ever touched them, and they gathered enough indoor grit by New Years that my mother would have to dust them off before putting them back in their wax paper bag for next Xmas.
As little nippers dad took us to see santa at the bartenders union hall. St nick smelled like a distillery and gave out chintzy colored popcorn balls. One bite and they fell to pieces like pie crust.
But of course the highlight of the season was the loot. The presents. Swag!
Right after Thanksgiving the Sear Roebuck Catalogue arrived. Thicker than our phone book, this glossy prospectus fed my hunger for gewgaws and trinkets like a narcotic. I’d stare at it for hours, until my bulging eyeballs threatened to fall out of my head and roll away.
But I never got a single solitary toy out of that catalogue. ‘Too expensive – it costs 2 dollars just for shipping and handling!’ mom would say.
Boy oh boy, I really truly wanted the plastic gumball machine they had in there. Just imagine if you can . . . a real gumball machine with real gumballs in it . . . and every time one of my friends wanted a gumball they had to put a penny in it . . . and I GOT TO KEEP THE PENNIES! Or else I could just rip open the bag of gumballs, never putting them in the machine, and chew on them until doomsday. Sweet bliss. But despite my transparent and frequent hints, i never got one.
Instead there would be a Whammo air-blaster. Shaped like a cross between a cannon and a pistol, you pulled back the lever and pulled the trigger and whammo! A blast of air would blow Christmas cards off the table or even scatter my glass marbles around like shrapnel. The air-blaster didn’t last long. I put the muzzle up against the back of my older brother Billys head and pulled the trigger. I thought there was a real possibility this might kill him, or at least put him in a coma. But alas all it did was tear the rubber diaphragm inside the airblaster, rendering it useless.
In my stocking there were always Slinkys, Duncan yo-yos, Bonomo’s turkish taffy, Crayola crayons, a pack of old maid cards, and a coloring book from Grandma Daisy.
Under the tree would be a hula hoop, an etch-a-sketch, and a Tonka truck. I’d get a board game – either operation or mousetrap. One year i remember getting a set of dominoes, which I promptly dropped, one by one, down the heat register.
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A response to the above from my daughter Madelaine:
Dear dad,
Since you were kind enough to share your Christmas memories I though I would send you some of mine. They are less smoky, and a little more bathed in discomfort. The Christmas I will never forget happened in Midway, UT the year I was 15. The previous year uncle ben had made grand promises to mom that he would fulfil our every Christmas wish. We spent weeks scouring catalogs picking out presents and making long detailed lists of everything from bicycles to underwear. Then the week before Christmas they got into a fight and he retracted the offer, so we were left gifting each other last year’s hand-me-down sweaters. Uncle Wylie came through on Christmas Day and gave us a case of spaghetti and several huge jars of Prego spaghetti sauce, which we ate every day for a month. That was a very gloomy year, but the next year we were picked for the ward “angel tree” and notified that our presents would be dropped of on Christmas Eve! Looking back on that night, I am still filled with awe at the generosity of those ward members. Granted, they were all living on pretty ritzy estates and probably had buckets full of cash lying around, but they unloaded no less than 23 construction sized trash bags of wrapped gifts, 3 whole bags for each of us. Almost 25 years later I still remember the smell of the bath & body works bath sets. We had so many bottles of lotion, perfume, sets of stationary, craft kits, socks, coats, dresses, toys, everything you could imagine. And the candy, oh man! mom only ever let us get candy with our own money (which was also our only means of getting new clothes or cool shoes), and we didn’t often get to go inside the store with her. I got a beautiful dress that year, I believe it was the only dress I’d had before that was brand new from the store, not made by or passed down from a family or ward member. It still had the tags and came with a gift receipt. When I finally grew out of it I was quite devastated, it was the first piece of clothing I felt beautiful in.
OK, I have to get back to work/ Most of the above is probably not true, in the Torkildson fashion I have inserted random details to take the place of my foggy memory, but who can say what is true all these years later anyway?
-Madel
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