LIFE BEFORE TEN

A Tour of Christmas Toys

        Viewed from above, a large formation of revelers is gathered, in the shape of a Christmas tree. They are decked out in thick coats and soft scarves, woolen bonnets on their heads. Each of them is holding a white candle. They are singing in sweet unison: “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony – I’d like to buy the world a Coke, and keep it company. That’s the song I sing…” My young eyes begin to fill up with tears.

        Christmas was my favorite time of year when I was a kid, beating my birthday by its sheer bigness – a festival of lights, songs, smells, tastes and touching TV commercials. It was an EVENT beyond all small happenings. When I went to Midnight Mass, it seemed to me like a secret gathering, under cover of night, with candlelight giving the experience a dark gothic feel. But as much as my mother half-tried to keep the Jesus in Christmas (she had almost become a nun, then left the convent to get married and divorced) it was really all about the presents. That may sound materialistic, but I knew what I anticipated about the holiday. I grew up “poor”, with an older and a younger sister, all of us two years apart, and my mother greatly believed in being fair to all of us, and never playing favorites. So sometimes the three of us received identical gifts, so no one would feel “gypped” or left out. The years brought a grand parade of toys, the most memorable of which I will list…

• Radios, our most highly prized gifts, came in sets of three, always bigger and better than the last time. The Daddy Longlegs of these was a white rectangle with an impressive amount of knobs, a silver plastic parabolic antenna on top, and a working CB on the side. Each of us having our own “handle”, or code name, we would endlessly eavesdrop on live conversations, occasionally breaking in with our freshly learned CB lingo. We felt like adults, cool and included.
• Sno-Block Makers (in the summertime, Sand-Block Makers). They are now called Brick Builders, perfect for igloos or sandcastles, three bricks at a time. Red plastic, cement brick sized, with a handle on top, they could be packed with snow, patted down, and plopped on the ground to release a perfect block. They were a super-duper help in making snow forts in Madawaska, Maine, where three feet of snow fell over 48 hours this Christmas.
• Some gifts were so big and momentous there could only be one of them, which we would all share. So it was with the Big Wheel, a plastic tricycle with an exaggerated front tire, perfect for tearing up the driveway of our housing project. And later on, when we were “old enough” to handle it, came the Red Baron in a flurry of hot dirt. It was also plastic, in Fireman Red, and was a sit-back bike that was low to the ground like a Formula One racer.
• I often got Boy Gifts, like the dolls I liked to call “action figures” – though my sisters got just as much action out of their dolls. This cast of characters included Stretch Armstrong, a muscular male doll that was made out of stretchable rubbery material, so he could lift weights higher, throw punches farther, or (as was the case with my older sister and I) could be used in a tug of war until his body broke, a red jellylike substance oozing out of his insides. Then there was Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, based on the TV hero who was a hybrid of man and machine – when he ran super fast, there was a metallic ba-na-na-na-na sound in his wake. The doll had tiny plastic “computer chips” that popped into his arm and leg. Wow! G.I. Joe was boring compared to him, who did nothing but look like a camouflaged soldier. He was supposed to be the real Tough Doll. But better than all these were my Star Wars figures, with accessories and movable limbs, and with names that excited me – Boba Fett, Jabba the Hut, Darth Vader, C3PO, Princess Leia, Obi Wan Kanobi, R2D2, the Stormtroopers… I once had them all playing football on a food tray, with spectacular tackles, but my mother grew disturbed, thinking I was imitating war!
• Of course my sisters got their own dolls, of the feminine persuasion, like the opulent Malibu Barbie, who had her own purple plastic sports car – complete with tiny 8-track tapes that fit neatly into a dashboard console. And there was her effeminate boyfriend Ken, with his perfect hair and pink polo shirt. I myself played with them sometimes, in this household that was all female except for me – I also enjoyed the puckered-lip baby dolls, the rubber kittens, and especially the Trolls with their round bellies and stand-on-end pink or yellow hair. My older sister called hers Boogieshoe, and my younger sister Bambi Genie.
• I extracted boundless hours of fun out of my Purple Pickup Truck (as I named it). I moved a lot of little characters and animals around in it, to and from a wooden farmhouse whose door went “baaaaa” whenever we opened it! I didn’t realize at the time that these toys neatly mirrored their surrounding rural town. So did some of our other toys, like the McDonald’s play set, with smiling employees, trays, tables, and a cash register that sounded a “Ding!” when touched. McDonald’s was almost the only “restaurant” in town.
• I had my own menagerie of stuffed animals, 14 in all, from the soft brown bear I named Million, because he was worth that much to me at 9 years old, to Purple Poodle Dog (Can you guess my favorite color?), to the 8-foot 4-inch long stuffed snake my mother made for me at 10, with its fleece flanks and blue velour tongue. I named it Ozzy, because my favorite song was Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train”.
• I can’t leave this list without including the coolest gift of them all – Lego! I received one Christmas a large rectangular box with a lunar station on the cover. The kid who yearned to be an astronaut, and would play with his long “Space 1999” craft with detachable ends that could make a mini-ship, and later with his white miniature space shuttle, this kid would get to build the lunar surface out of gun-metal grey sections, create a space base out of stacking pieces, and finish it off with an astronaut who had a removable helmet, head, torso, tools, and legs!

        What is most amazing to me is that my mother, in her bottomless cellar, preserved all these toys for posterity. Now one of my nephews, who is four, is running around with rocket ships, animals from the barn that goes “baaaaa,” and he is also transporting stones with Purple Pickup Truck, while his father runs a stoneworks business out of his home.

        And now the child I was, waking up at 5 or 6 Christmas morning, is heavily anticipating New Year’s Eve, when his parents let him stay up late, and after all the concerts and holiday talk, a shiny ball will drop in Times Square, New York City (wherever that is), and all the happy people will sing that song with the magical melody, that hopeful and wistful song (yes, it was full of wist) and soon his soft eyes will glisten with tears.

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