Sears...Where Santa Shops

Sometimes the best Christmas memories of gifts received aren't the ones where we were the recipient of the gift at all but instead were among those privileged to witness the exchange.

I would be hard pressed to name a specific Christmas that was "the best" for me growing up as a child in the days where toys pretty much were only displayed in stores for two months out of the year and where children only received toys twice a year at Christmas and on birthdays.  No one that I can even think of in our large, kid-filled neighborhood got toys in the middle of the year unless somebody was lucky enough to maybe have an aunt or uncle come to town bearing gifts like the 3 wise men in June but even this was pretty rare.  There was just something so exquisite about the day when the Sears Christmas catalog arrived and each of us kids would take turns at the breakfast table for the next month or so turning the pages and marking our "wants" from Santa.  Those wants changed as the days drug by; President Andrew Jackson's "Kitchen Cabinet" never made any more important executive decisions than we did if we decided to change one of our "big" presents on the list. It never occurred to any of us as to the reason that we had to circle stuff in the catalog anyway; after all we always sat on the old man's knee down at the Roebuck Shopping Center (except for my sister who was scared to death of Santa although she claims not to have been but that is another story for another day) and recited our well-rehearsed and multi-bullet-pointed verbal list of what our hearts desired for him to load on the sleigh that year.  Somehow the explanation that Sears had a direct line to the North Pole sufficed and we wore that catalog out, each dutifully taking our turn with it at the breakfast table with care not to rip any of the pages.

My Christmases past are filled with achingly exquisite wonderful merriment and adventure of growing up in Sherwood Forest along with a bunch of other kids just like myself who wanted and got a Barbie doll, a three-speed bike, a skateboard or maybe Rockem-Sockem Robots at some particular time in some unnamed year and there was much peace on earth and good will toward men.  By noon on Christmas we were all out in the street sharing our loot, showing off whatever the "best" prize (in our opinion) happened to be that was under our tree that morning and playing together like it was any other day of the year because by noon on Christmas well, it pretty well was.

Growing up in Birmingham the smokestacks of Southern Electric Steel cast a long shadow. Steel was King and if your daddy didn't work for a public utility or in insurance he pretty much worked in a steel mill.  Daddy was a foreman over the melt shop.  This meant that he never worked a 9:00 to 5:00 job and the work shifts meant that he wasn't at home with us a lot during our waking hours growing up.  He had to miss out on a lot to make a living for the five of us. But on this one particular Christmas Eve morning he was at home in bed.  As a matter of fact we were all still in bed because it was very early when there was a knock at the front door.  I don't remember who got up first, mother or daddy, but one of them did. And there followed an exchange of voices at the door and with my mother becoming as vocally animated as a school girl while she and daddy and this unknown third voice all talked excitedly together (at least from what I could hear from the bedroom)  and then I heard something being huffed and puffed in to the house. I knew it was for her because I could never ever remember  my mother being so downright giddy before; she was far too sensible and a good Baptist besides.  But there it was, I could hear it in her voice.  I rolled over in bed just letting the excitement of whatever it was that involved my mother being so happy wash over me like bubbly, swishy Seven-Up.  She and my daddy were like two kids in the kitchen along with this unnamed third person.  I guess I must have finally gotten up to see what the fireworks were all about and ran in to the kitchen to find the Sears  delivery man rolling in a brand new portable dishwasher.  You know, the kind with the hose attachment that affixed to the kitchen faucet (built-ins were still for the idle rich back then) and as big as bulky as a small chest freezer but for us as fine a work of art as the Taj Mahal--no more washing dishes in the sink! My mother was mouthing those sweet exchanges with my daddy about how he shouldn't have spent so much money on her and my daddy, who at that particular moment appeared to be ten-feet tall in my eyes was whispering back that he wanted her to have it and that he'd been saving his money for it and that he loved her--I actually have no idea what they were saying but it all appeared to be what I've just written or something close because she was hugging him and we kids were all dancing around our new dishwasher and we were so happy because they were so happy!  This was going to be something to brag about to my friends in the neighborhood--"my daddy got my mother a dishwasher for Christmas...oh don't worry about using a clean plate, it's ok, we'll just put it in the DISHWASHER when we're finished..."

It's hard to surprise a mother at Christmas.  And after having been one for many years I know this even more to be true.  We are the orchestrator of so much at Christmas that it's  sometimes very hard for our loved ones to truly pull off a surprise.  But on that one special morning, the day before Christmas, my mother was as surprised as any child would ever have been when they woke up to find that Santa had brought them something magical.  And she loved that dishwasher.  And we loved our daddy for buying it for her.