Memorable Christmas Gifts

There is a theme to Christmas memories. 

Bittersweet. 

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

           Final lines of The Great Gatsby.

"Nostalgia isn't what it used to be."

           Classic joke.

"You can't go home again."

           Title of a book by Thomas Wolfe

I thought I would have an easy-to-write, holiday-themed blog post reporting readers' descriptions of favorite gifts. It turned out to be hard. People reported long-held memories. They are moments of joy, a moment that is past and gone. 

Bittersweet mixes joy and loss. A bittersweet memory persists as an ache-y spot. Edgar Allen Poe wrote about this in "The Raven:" "Nevermore" is the saddest word in English, he said. 

One reader, a neighbor of my farm, got a toy tractor of his own, with heavy metal construction and thick-treaded rear tires. 

A few readers got Lionel brand electric trains in young boyhood. They set them up with their fathers. One reader begged his parents to help him buy a Lionel train to give to his grandfather -- just what grandad wanted.

A few readers got bicycles. Bicycles are liberation. You could go places on your own. One reader still had his at college, when it was stolen from where it was chained to a fence in front of his Harvard dorm.

One reader got a transistor radio. It was an introduction to electronic communication. Sixty years later he builds data centers for a mobile-phone company.

A young reader (yes, I have one Gen Z reader) said her favorite gift was something she got a few years ago, a mini-Segway.

She is still creating childhood memories and the Segway and the parent who gave it to her are still around. Too early for bittersweet. The nostalgia comes later.

One reader reported wanting dolls designed around a theme of bug-eyes babies in poverty. She said she just had to have it, and her parents came through.

People who were poor in their childhoods remember Christmas as a standout moment, a tiny exception to the rule of not-having, or as a moment when felt what they didn't have. However small, a treat was memorable: a salvaged tree repaired and decorated with little lights or a story of Santa Claus having eaten the cookie, proof that he came and left, even if all he brought was an orange for the stocking.

A reader well into his 80s, now in end-of-life care and on oxygen, told me his favorite gift was a winter jacket his late wife gave in 1964. He still has it and wears it.

One reader mentioned disappointment at age seven. He wanted a blackboard and chalk, and got the gift. The disappointment was that "Merry Christmas from Santa" was written on the blackboard in his mother's handwriting. What? Santa is really just Mom??!! 

The best stories were stories of gifts given. A reader gave her husband, then in the end-stage of hospice, a copy of a book he had owned then lost in a move, the National Lampoon 1964 Yearbook parody. He received it in time to read it again in his last two weeks.

Grandparents enjoyed passing down a happy family keepsake, a rocking chair for toddlers in the form of a boat.

My own best memory is the long Christmas Eve evening of frustration while I tried to figure out how to assemble a sit-in-it pedal car for my four-year old. It looked about like this, except mine was yellow: 

The box said it was easy to assemble. Ha! Perhaps if one has assembled three of them, then the fourth would be easy, but the first one was confusing and there were lots of parts. The joy of the memory was that I managed to complete the job about midnight, a deadline met. Whew. Santa could go to bed. It would be five hours before Dillon would wake up and go downstairs to see what was under the tree. 

That was 30 years ago. A good memory of a time here and gone.

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