It's Christmas Eve 2010

12/24/2010

This has to be one of my most favorite days of the year.  The Eves of Christmases past bring up a host of memories, all of them good.  I drift back and forth between childhood memories and those of my adulthood.  One realization of mine needs to be noted here for the world to see; I am still a kid when it comes to Christmas.

I suppose my only disappointment, one I am totally responsible for, is the placement of an artificial tree in my house.  I don’t like it, but it is a means to an end.  Since The Nancy and I travel during the Holidays – a couple days here and a couple days there, a live tree tended to dry out to the point where breathing on it would bring down an avalanche of greenish-brown needles.  By the time we would take the formerly “live tree” down, the needles on the floor would clog up the vacuum cleaner (or “sweeper,” as The Nancy’s mom refers to it).  We finally had to decide between a fake tree or no tree.  Fake won out.  Nonetheless, from a distance, in the dark, it looks real; it just doesn’t have that pleasant, seasonal conifer smell we all love in the house at Christmastime.

The other day, as I was watching my favorite morning TV news show, the anchors were talking about Christmases past, and items they had asked for but did not get.  Brian Kilmead talked of an alien figure he wanted, a Colossus Rex.  I don’t recall it, but it was important to him, and forty years later he is still remembering a $10.00 toy.

Yesterday I told The Nancy about Kilmead and this toy.  I asked her if there was something she wanted as a kid and didn’t get, all the while thinking Kilmead is hung up about something he didn’t get forty years ago, she answered me without hesitation so quickly I was taken by surprise.  “A bike, I asked for a bike every Christmas and never got one.” It wasn’t that her parents couldn’t afford one for her; they told her she would hurt herself, and that was it, and she never got the bike. 

Think back now, what about your own Christmases past?  Is there something you wanted but didn’t get?  As for me, I can’t think of a thing.  Christmas was always special; even the one I spent at Lackland Air Force in 1963 in a barrack with about eighty other guys. 

I wonder if it’s too late to purchase a bicycle for The Nancy.  In light of the fact she may hurt herself, perhaps, due to her ever advancing age, an adult-sized tricycle might be best.

And that is all I have to say about that…