My Favorite Childhood Christmases

I ran across this picture of an advertisement for one of my favorite childhood Christmas gifts and it reminded me of some of my favorite toys. I don't know where my parents got my Vac-u-form but I do remember going uptown to have to buy replacement supplies for it at one of the local shops. Remember when small towns actually had small, local shops instead of Wal-Marts? (The cheap Chinese goods they sold uptown just seemed to be so much more American in some way than the ones Wal-Mart imports.) I remember creating several of the toys pictured in this picture myself although I am pretty sure the roof on my cabin would have leaked had any pioneers had the courage to inhabit it.

The year I finally got my race car set I thought my life had been made complete. And it was for several weeks. My brothers, parents and I had a lot of fun with that thing. This set looks almost exactly like mine except it had a red and a yellow car. One of them was definitely more responsive than the other. Whoever had the bad car could be assured that it would jump the track before the race was over.

But the most memorable Christmas morning was the year we had to go down the slide in the living room to get to the kitchen. Yes. you read that correctly. One year my Dad made us a slide for our yard. He had also made a swing set. He didn't bring the swing set inside the house but he and Mom set the slide up in the living room of our little four room house. The only way to fit it in was to set it up so that one end was in the kitchen. We climbed to the top of the slide and slid into the kitchen for breakfast that morning.

As a kid I had no idea how modestly we lived. How could I when I had a Dad talented enough to make us anything we wanted? At one point in our lives before he started working on antique cars he made us several go-carts, each one better than the other. 

Our swing set was so much better than anything we could have bought at the hardware store. (No there were no mountains in the background in Carmi, IL....can't a guy a have a little artistic license? This is the Internet after all) We could swing very high and the thing never tipped over. It was industrial strength. Dad set it up at the top of a hill in our back yard. We would swing as high as our legs would pump and then "bail out," flying through the air before landing in a ball and rolling down the hill. It is quite possibly the butchest thing I have ever done in my life, accomplished before the age of five or six before I had sense to know any better.

 Thanks Mom and Dad making us feel rich every Christmas.