Christmas Past

After a hiatus of over a year I have decided to once again put my friends to sleep with my meanderings.

Christmas Past

When I was five Christmas came to North Carolina so cold and crisp the air crackled and winter-browned fescue crunched beneath your feet as you ran across hoarfrost.   Christmas is never quite as special again as it is when you are five; when Santa is real and the excitement of the season has been building in you since Thanksgiving.

My Father was a Christmas person who, all his life, delighted in the season.  The rest of the year he may be the staid serious businessman but in December he became a child once again.  One of his delights was to leave a trail of Hershey Kisses in the house for to me to find at different places on different days.  He would explain to me that these were left by Santa’s elves who had come in the night to check and see if I had been a good boy.  It is hard to believe that in those days of the ‘50’s that Christmas was the only time I remember ever seeing Hershey Kisses.  When I was five it would become for me then, and for all my life, the year of the Christmas Train.  

It is an unwritten law, only known to five year olds, that you must be awake before sunrise on Christmas morning.  Not wanting to break this special rule, I was indeed up before daylight with the wide- eyed anticipation you can only have if you’re five, and its Christmas morning.  I raced from my room across the piles of Batman and Superman comics that had lulled me to an unwanted sleep the night before, almost leapt across the steel grating of the floor furnace in the hall, in to the living room and on with the lights to find if I had been “bad or good”. 

There, racing around the Christmas tree, was an electric train.  It had an engine, a coal car, a cattle car, and even a shiny red caboose.  It was a real, true Christmas surprise you see, because I had never asked Santa for a train.  Yet as soon as I saw it I knew it was what I needed to make it that most special Christmas.  I cannot remember another single detail of that Christmas sixty-one years ago but I remember my train and I remember one of the best days I ever spent with my Father as we took turns being engineer.

Sixty-one years later I still have my Christmas Train.  I keep each car in the original boxes they came in when I was five.  The engine quit running many years ago but I still hold on to it. Sometimes when the air crackles with cold and the grass is white with frost I open the box, and pull out the old engine. I breathe in its familiar smells and for just an instant; just a brief moment, Daddy is driving the train, Mama is in the kitchen filling the air with the smell of baked cookies, and I am five again.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

As Time Goes By.