Red Room Where the Writers Are

When I was a kid, Christmas was very important. It was the highlight of my year.

We practiced our "pieces" for the Christmas skit at church. It was usually a one-liner, but it seemed to be too much for me when I was small, and putting my assigned five or six words together at just the right time didn’t often work out for me.

The local movie theater invited all the children in town and the surrounding rural area to an afternoon of free cartoons and cowboy movies. Santa Claus was waiting for us in the lobby afterwards. He handed out small brown paper sacks filled with Christmas candy, peanuts in the shell, and one big apple. I’ll never forget the mouth-feel of sticky hard candy covered with peanut shell residue, yet it was all I could think of when watching the movies.

We didn’t have piles and piles of packages under our tree, like there is for so many people today. I don’t know what it was like for other families in our community, when I was a kid. For us though, there was one main wrapped gift under the tree for each child. It was never very much, but it had been carefully chosen. There were minor ones too. Pj’s, underclothes, and maybe some very inexpensive little playthings. But the magical effect of the colorful packages wasn’t lessened by the value of what was inside them. The feelings of anticipation, the wishing for something special that couldn’t be guessed at, that’s what the value of the wrapped gifts was to me. The before was so much better than the after. It still is. Anticipation is what it’s all about.

Each year, around Christmas time, the stores and shops in our town ran promotions to keep people in town and to encourage them to shop locally. There was always a fancy wrapped box in each store, with a slit cut in the top to place a slip filled out with your name, in the hopes of your being drawn to win some special item.

Everyone filled these slips out. A few stores had drawing boxes for the children, too. One year, when I was about ten or eleven, one of these stores, F.C. Larson Hardware, had a box for a child’s drawing. I, of course, put a slip in with my name on it. And that year I won.

I could chose between a cheap little doll or a poorly made baseball glove.

I had always wanted to attract the attention of my older brothers, and thought the glove would be a great way to do that. They might be coaxed into playing catch with me. So, with that thought in mind, I choose the baseball glove.

The next week, winners of all the drawings, and what was won, were listed in the newspaper. F.C. Larson’s winners were listed, and read: "Winner of the Children’s Prize: Choice of either a baseball glove or a doll", along with my name. Added was: "Of course she chose the doll."

It was yet another message from my culture and my community.

But my brothers did play a few sessions of catch with me that next spring. I used my own glove.