Two weeks after I first posted this photo, I took a closer look at the background and noticed there was only one stocking hanging up; that seemed odd. (It’s tacked to the doorframe because that house didn’t have a fireplace/mantel.) Probably that was my brother’s stocking and I had already taken mine down to see what was inside. People didn’t buy Christmas stockings then; Christmas stockings were just regular boy’s dress stockings pressed into service for the day, and filled with gifts too small to wrap – a single orange all the way from Florida, a half-dozen walnuts, some pencils, a pack of Black Jack gum. That Christmas orange makes me think now of the Godfather II scene where young Vito brings home a single pear from the grocery store; we see it sitting in solitary splendor on the kitchen table as his wife exclaims “Oh, what a beautiful pear-a!”
Christmas eve, I would psych myself to wake up at about four in the morning to see what Santa (or later, whoever) had brought me. I would open the wrapping paper just enough to see what was inside. Any playing with, using, reading, eating, or trying things on would wait until the sun came up. My curiosity satisfied, I went back to bed. The only exception to this rule was the Christmas I got the camera. I was excited, and I studied the instruction booklet, loaded the camera and took my first picture, this time exposure of our tree. I can tell I broke my no-early-using rule that year; in the photo it’s still dark outside.
I have a dim memory of a very young me sitting on Santa’s lap and getting a small, flat box of modeling clay as a gift from his employer, probably Hahne’s, my mother’s favorite department store. I had good fun with that simple pre-Christmas toy, making coiled snakes and pipe figures.
There wasn’t a lot of money for Christmas gifts, but my mother always managed. I remember an Erector set with real nuts and bolts and enough curved steel sections to make a Ferris wheel. A year or two before that, Lincoln Logs, with the logs and roof boards made of real wood, not the plastic crap they use today. Lincoln would weep.
One year, probably 1949, my mother took me down to Newark, “just to look through the stores”. She was trying to find out what I wanted for Christmas. That year atomic energy was a hot subject as the Cold War heated up, and in one of the toy departments I spotted an atomic energy kit, specifically the “Gilbert U-238 Nuclear Physics Atomic Energy Laboratory”. Its price was an astounding $49.95, over $500 in today’s money, so I knew I wasn’t going to be Geiger-countering any uranium ore. That Christmas I ended up with a modest-sized basic chemistry set, which was fun and dangerous and educational too.
Soon after New Year’s Day, neighborhood kids would drag their family’s Christmas tree and any other trees they could find to the double vacant lot across the street from Vince’s, to await the annual post-holiday accidental Christmas tree fire. There they sat, the pile growing each day, as if nobody knew what was going to happen. There were usually 20 or 30 trees gathered before a sensible limit was reached and agreed on and someone lit a match.
The trees were of course dry by then, and they went up fast, like a genuine forest fire; it was spectacular. Local grownups and even the kids from Pop’s would come to watch. One year someone had thrown a dead cat onto the pile as it grew, and we made mental bets on how long it would take the fire to consume it entirely.
Finally, one year we collected too many trees, and soon after that fire ‘broke out’, a neighbor called the fire department. That particular fire melted the insulation off the lot’s overhead telephone wires. After that, the city began hauling the trees away before an ignition-worthy critical mass could accumulate, and eventually the lots were taken over by garden apartments.
Merry Christmas, everyone!