MEMORIES OF CHRISTMAS PAST

CHRISTMAS 1949

1949 was the first Christmas celebrated by my entire immediate family. This picture shows my mom holding Tom who had been born in February. In the middle was Jim who was seven, and on the end me the big brother who was just 10.

Me, Tom and Jim with my Grandmother. This grandmother was my father’s mother. He was her seventh of eight children. My other grandmother wasn’t with us that Christmas. She had passed away the in the spring of 48.

Tom on Christmas morning going after his new baby doll. For some reason all of us boys received variations of this same doll on our first Christmas. I used Tom’s doll  as a stand-in for the Baby Jesus in a nativity scene we set up after we moved to our new house several years later. Somebody stole it!

Opening the presents … for some reason the Red Ryder Rifle was never on my Christmas list. I knew you could shoot your eye out with one of them.

Christmas 1950

One year later, here’s my dad with his three sons. For some reason, the Christmas tree never seems to change. The wallpaper did change on a regular basis. Our landlord was a display director and he was forever experimenting with the decor of the house in which we lived. The color scheme of this wallpaper was green, shades of magenta and white. I think it changed one more time before we moved to our own house in the burbs.

Christmas 1951

For some reason my brother Jim and I ceased to be the focal point of Christmas morning.

Christmas 1953

This was our last Christmas in the house in the city. Notice my little brother’s two six-shooters. Somehow they don’t seem to work with a kid who needs suspenders to hold his pants up. If you look close, you can see the train tracks for my classic Lionel Prairie Steam Locomotive passenger train.

This year I displayed part of the train on one of the photo shelves in the living room.

Christmas 1954

On December 7 the family moved out of the house in the city and moved into the big old farmhouse in the suburbs where I still live. That first Christmas it snowed and my brothers and I built this snowman. We could never have a dog when we lived in the rental house in the city, and the long promised puppy was still in our future. So I made this snow-puppy that surprisingly looks like Mlle. Renee. If you look close you can even see the snow bone I made for her.

Oh, the great memories of those Christmases past … we didn’t have a care in the world and we could only dream of what lay ahead for us. They really were the best of times!