My earliest memory of Christmas is almost certainly 1953.
It’s very strange thinking back 69 years and remembering anything. In fact, other than that Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, I only have two or three very vague memories from the first five years of my life. I remember the last time I saw my father, the night he left us in the fall of 1952. I was in a playpen.
I remember visiting my mother in a little hospital in early 1953 after we were in a bad automobile accident and I have a very vague picture of my mother and I in our first studio apartment in Dayton in early 1954. I remember I slept on a trundle bed and my favorite toy — maybe my only toy — was a small set of Lincoln Logs.
But I remember my fifth Christmas. Christmas Eve was very cold that year. We went to Christmas Eve services at my grandmother’s Evangelical and Reformed Church and then we drove out to the west end of town, where newer houses were lift up for the season.
Another memory from that year as a gift that was popular then and no longer necessary. Someone had sent us a crate of oranges from California. It was the only way to get oranges in the Midwest back then.
I remember Christmas morning 1953, maybe because I got the biggest Christmas present I ever got. It was a Lionel electric train set, one of really good quality. Years later, my mother told me the locomotive alone had cost $60.
It was a gift that never left my grandparents’ house … until years later it just sort of vanished.
It’s strange, though. My families were always traditionalists about waiting till Christmas morning to open the gifts, but Christmas Eve was always the best part of the holiday to me. Maybe it’s the Holy Night part of it.
Or maybe it’s just 1953.