Sorting Out the Wheat From The Chaff

I have tried to think of something bad about Christmas. So far, I’m coming up empty. Oh, it is easy today to complain about overspending, crowded shopping centers, gosh-awful traffic, and all the extraneous stuff that comes with the season.

Small potatoes all.

Nothing could beat getting out of school for two weeks! We would reexplore every nook and cranny in town. We’d play tackle football in the front yard. We’d wrestle on the braided rug in the living room. We’d lay on that same rug and turn over every single page in the Sears and Roebuck Christmas Catalog, selecting the thing we liked best on each page. There was no way we could afford it, but it didn’t keep us from picking!

Dad would actually give Leon the ax and turn us loose in the woods behind the house. Mom could make any scraggly tree we brought home fit for Rockefeller Plaza. And the anticipation of a gift under that tree with your name on it had our little hearts beating like a hummingbird wing on steroids.

All was truly merry and bright. Our family spent an inordinate amount of wonderful time gathered around the fireplace in that little living room.

And David Mark and I are thankful to this day that Leon used the ax at Christmas on the tree….and not on us like he did the rest of the year!

We couldn’t spell extraneous in 1956, but it was maybe our favorite part of Christmas. You couldn’t hardly see the brand-new watches or the chrome pen and pencil sets through the window of Mr. Cannon’s Rexall Drugstore for all the white snowflakes, green and red ribbons, and multicolored wreaths he had painted on the glass.

You could walk three doors down Broadway Street from the drugstore and Mr. James Williams’ Ben Franklin Store had Santa Clauses sprinkled in amongst the painted-on snowflakes and candy canes. You had to squint between Christmas scenes to see the giant shelves filled with Brach Jelly Nougat Candy squares, fold-out spy glasses, and Roy Rogers gun and holster sets.

If you turned the other direction and walked a couple of buildings up Broadway to the House of Furniture, Mr. Cecil Jackson had snow painted a foot deep on both windows and the door. Mr. Robert Hall, at the Western Auto just off of Broadway, on Cedar Avenue, had snow, reindeer, and a giant Santa Claus fixing to hop down a chimney painted across his gigantic window….

It was a bit hard to figure out exactly how the faux Christmas decorations adorning every storefront in town helped sell Timex watches, Lincoln Logs, sofas and loveseats, Tootsie Rolls, and Western Flyer bicycles.

But I guarantee you, it didn’t hurt! It was a joy to go window-looking. We were not even thinking about shopping. It was a treat to walk around the square, taking in all the special Christmas scenes courtesy of every store owner in town. And, it didn’t cost nothing!

Which, back in those days, was about all we had.

Overspending was out of the question. And we didn’t have malls, Amazon Prime, shopping centers, or doorbuster sales. And, as to a traffic problem, we could park near ’bout every car in town in those large (to accommodate the Cadillac and Buick owners) parking spaces in the middle of the aforementioned Broadway Street.

Buddy Wiggleton discovered early in life we could hide between those cars in the middle of the road and throw snowballs at innocent Christmas shoppers scurrying by in four different directions. That is about the most extraneous Yuletide fun that the law would allow!

This was way before global warming. Almost every Christmas part, or all of the streets, would ice over. It was Bobby Brewer and Ricky Hale’s idea to sled off that big hill where Forrest Avenue ran down into Main Street. We’d get a running start and all of us would jump on Ricky’s four-man Flexible Flyer and down that hill we’d roar.

The telephone poles would be rushing by like a picket fence. Of course, we were completely out of control….with a crash landing being the only possible way to stop! About halfway down I’d get to praying that one of two things were taking place down on Main Street. Either the road was too iced over to have any traffic, OR, all the cars that could be on that street were already parked up in the middle of Broadway.

Sometimes we made a Christmas tradition out of extraneous stuff.

We didn’t even mind when Mom would not let us open our present on Christmas morning until AFTER she had read near ’bout the entire second chapter of Luke. She’d really emphasize that part about where Mary pondered in her heart, the Heavenly Host were singing, and that baby boy wrapped in swaddling clothes was lying in a manger.

Let me tell you, there wasn’t one thing extraneous about that!

Merry Christmas,

Kes