Here is a replica of my favorite gift.
Please tell me about your favorite gift.
I hope to publish holiday-themed posts on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. The posts will be a collection of some of your stories.
The photo above is of a cleaned-up, repainted version of the gift I got in 1954. It is in my living room today, a quirky piece of art.
The tractor was under the tree when I was four. It is four feet long, made of metal, and weighs about 50 pounds. It is geared low, like a real tractor. I could pedal it through mud, with traction from the thick treads on the rear tires. That is what I loved: that risk of getting stuck in soft ground, but then powering out of it. This was an extravagant gift for my parents. Dad was an elementary school principal; mom stayed home at our house at the farm to take care of my two siblings and me. On Christmas morning I mostly ignored the tractor to play with something else, disappointing my parents, a story they told me decades later. But soon I played with it every day.
One person my age told me about his favorite gift, an electric train set -- by Lionel -- and setting it up with his father.
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| 1950s Lionel locomotive |
Another told me about getting hand-painted toy soldiers from his father who was in active duty in the Navy. The two of them arranged them in battle formations.
Please send me your story, using my email address: peter.w.sage@gmail.com. Please describe the gift and write a couple of sentences about it. If you happen to have a photograph of it or something similar to it, please send that, too. Let me know if I can use your name or if it must be anonymous.
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4 comments:
A list of Rosebuds (with happier endings)?! Nice idea.
My first phonograph with a real needle to transmit the sound. I still have my Tubby The Tuba record. Probably same as Peter 1954. An Erector Set. maybe 1957. How did Santa sneak that 3-speed bicycle into my house?
A Lionel electric train cattle car with cows that moved. An Erector Set complete with an electric motor you could plug into house power, driving a worm gear. A Gilbert Chemistry Set that my friends and I used to make a kind of gunpowder and blow things up with, which cost my friend Larry his eyebrows one day (they grew back). An Etch-a-Sketch that I learned to write cursive on, and spent a lot of time one day going back-and-forth until I had cleared a window in the glass and could see what the internalmechanism looked like. A number of plastic models you could glue together of fighter planes and other military equipment. A balsa wood kit to glue together of a wire guided 42” wingspan model airplane you could fly in circles around you on the wires, complete with a .35 in.³ gasoline engine, 10” propellers, and a U-Reely handle you could fly it with, andwind the wires up into when you were done flying. A chain-drive tricycle. A bicycle.
Also, a transparent plastic “space helmet“ with a hole in front of it so you could breathe, which always seemed totally wrong to me. But it was still fun to go around wearing it.
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