 | ||||
| ||||
| ||||
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE - We're moving into the Christmas period and I would love to have some emails from you classmates that share some Christmas stories with us.Please include your class year with your e-mails.
I sat down and tried to remember something unique about my Christmas memories as a child growing up in Huntsville in the 1950’s. In my quest I remembered the toys that I found under the trees over the years like the Fanner 50 cap gun, Tinker Toys, Krazy Ikes, and red American Building Bricks and real wooden Lincoln Logs. I remember the year I got my favorite toy, “Robert The Robot”, who would walk across the floor as you cranked a handle on a pistol grip and would say “I am Robert Robot, mechanical man; drive me and steer me, wherever you can” when you turned a knob on his back. I remember the toys that my brother Don got like the real football and the electric football game and even the Erector set with a real electric motor. Then there was the year that my Aunt Helen gave me a Goldie Locks and Three Bears Avon soap set. That gift was not appreciated by a boy of eight. I remember getting the Captain Gallant Foreign Legion fort that came from the Sears catalog that sold back then for about eight dollars and now goes for over $400 on e-Bay. I wish I had kept that one. I don’t dare check the price for the Avon Goldie Locks and Three Bears soap!The toys were new and unique to me, but at the same time I was opening those presents under my tree, hundreds, if not thousands of other kids were opening the same boxes with the same toys inside. What might be rare for my block on Clinton Street, was common in many other blocks and neighborhoods not only in Huntsville, but also across the country.It took a long while to really recall something that made my Christmas holidays stand out from all the other kids on the block. A smile came upon my face when I did. It finally dawned on me the one thing that I felt was truly unique in our house. When our stockings were hung by the chimney with care on the night before Christmas, my brother and I were the envy of all our friends. Now to put the story in the right perspective, you have to remember that giant Christmas stockings were not as commercial back in the early ‘50s as they are today. Back then stockings were either normal white socks, or if you were lucky, you would have one of the ones made of the red mesh netting like fruit came packed in. People didn’t got out and buy those jumbo size ones that are sold today. But not in our house, we had the granddaddy stockings of all stockings.I wrote an earlier article about how my father, Jack Towery, stepped on a land mine at Omaha Beach on D-Day, and lost a leg as the result of that action. It was that bitter lemon of his life that we used to make Christmas lemonade, figuratively speaking. When he was fitted with his artificial leg he was given some big, white cotton stockings that went to about his mid-thigh and were designed to cover the mechanical parts of the wooden and metal leg so that the moving parts would not catch on the material of his pants.I don’t know who started the tradition or when it was started, but on Christmas Eve, Don and I would dig in our father’s sock drawer and each pull out one of the big white socks.The house on East Clinton had real wooden mantels, and real chimneys. We had to be careful where we hung them because the fireplace was not just decorative; it was still used to heat the house. As late as 1953 the fireplace still burned coal that was hauled in from the coal shed in the back of the house. The stockings were hung on the mantel with large nails which left holes that are probably still there today if they left the original fireplaces in the house when they restored it. On Christmas day, we would awake to find that the stockings were bulging and lumpy with the contents left by Santa. Back then I was positive that I would get more in my stocking than any of my friends got in theirs. I will never know for sure, but today I would guess that those socks could hold close to five pounds of fruit, nuts, and candy. They were about three feet long and as round at the top as a leg.We didn’t get toys in our stockings back then, but we loved the hard candy and the nuts the most, and we took great delight in dumping the contents onto the floor and examining it. The items I disliked the most were the Brazil nuts, maybe because of the politically incorrect slang term used for them back then. As a kid I could eat the apples and oranges and even the pecans, but I never found out how to get a Brazil nut open. If you hit it with a hammer hard enough to crack the shell, you usually smashed the nut inside so bad that you didn’t want to eat it even if you liked its taste. So this year when I see a stocking on the mantel, it will mean a little more to me now that I have remembered those days. I never knew as a kid what the cost of those great white stockings really was. I just knew how lucky I was to have it. I never knew or appreciated that they were not bought in some fancy department store, but rather were bought with the sacrifices that my father along with the other members of the Greatest Generation paid. Today I am a retired Air Force officer myself, and throughout my service years spent several of my own Christmas Eves in other countries. Only now can I see past the fruit and candy capacity of the large white sock that I hung on the mantel, and see the capacity of honor and duty that my father and his generation possessed for me to be able to have it. I am now aware that perhaps the greatest gift I ever received from him is not the stocking alone. It is the same gift that another generation is now receiving from their own military parents who are serving our great nation on foreign shores. The greatest gift is their sacrifices that give us the freedom to hang our stockings, big or small, on our own mantels on Christmas Eve. God bless them all and grant them a Merry Christmas.
Christmas Present