If there’s one semi-universal thing that unifies Americans from coast to coast and border to border about Christmas, it’s kids visiting Santa and letting him know what they want.
In fact, one of the best scenes in the classic 1983 movie “A Christmas Story” has Ralphie letting Santa know how much he wants a BB gun and Santa responding by telling him he’ll shoot his eye out.
The only weird thing about it is that Ralphie is actually too old to be asking Santa Claus for gifts.
Santa is mostly there for the littler kids. Like this little guy in Illinois in 1951.
It’s a memory that no longer exists, if it ever did. I have no memories of ever sitting with a Santa or conversing with one, let alone a meeting that happened 72 years ago.
It was also a Christmas that was unique in a few other ways. It was the last Christmas that I was an only child and also the last one in which my birth parents were together. My earliest Christmas memories are from 1953 and ’54, both years in Crestline, Ohio.
Maybe my greatest childhood memory was from 1953. Certainly the most wonderful gift I ever got — a Lionel electric train set back in the day before they were plasticized. My mother told me later that the locomotive alone had cost $60 … in 1953 dollars.
My memory of 1954 isn’t of a gift. I remember it being incredibly cold on Christmas Eve and going to church services and then my mother driving us to the side of town where most of the houses were decorated for the holiday.
Those are just about the only Christmases I remember from my childhood. I had two or three nice ones in the 1970s with my first wife, with the one that stood out the most was a week in London over Christmas 1977. It was the first time I had been in the UK, and that isn’t the best week to sightsee.
We went to some theatrical productions in the West End, and saw a couple of movies including the first “Star Wars” movie in a massive old movie palace. We did some shopping and spent a couple of days doing museums.
It was fun, but sadly it was the last Christmas we spent together even though we didn’t actually split up till January 1980.
My only really memorable Christmas in the ’80s was the last one. I’ve written before about flying across the country and back in less than five days to be in Virginia for my grandmother’s last Christmas. It meant a lot for me to see her one last time.
The next one that was special was 1992, my first with my new family. Nicole and I, Pauline and Virgile, flew to Virginia so my wife could meet my parents and the kids could meet their grandparents.
After that, Christmas was wonderful with children and then grandchildren in my life. In fact, in 2008 I even got a Santa Claus picture that was more of a favorite to me than 1951. This one was of my first grandchild, Pauline’s daughter Arti, and was taken when she visited Santa for the first time in 2008.
The cutest thing about the picture is the contrast in sizes. I’ve never seen anyone so small sitting on Santa’s lap, but then again, Arti was barely three months old. She’s 15 now and hasn’t had Santa in her life for a while.
In fact, our youngest grandchild is 9 now, so Santa isn’t in our lives at all. But if I live to be 100, I will still love this picture.
