Now days Christmas seems to be the time for exchanging a lot of things you can’t afford for a lot of things you don’t want. It should be the way we spend Christmas that is more important than how much. Paying $25 for a Christmas tree causes you to get trimmed more than the tree.
Guess I sound like Old Scrooge. Sugar takes care of all this present stuff and does give me equal credit when the Christmas tags are pasted on. You can always make a good fellow out of yourself by getting something meaningful for that mate of yours. If the washing machine is up for replacement, Christmas time is the right time to bring home a brand new washer. If you love a good television, let Christmas be an excuse to give yourself a Christmas present by getting a bigger TV, with all those speakers so sound can enter your ears, stereo like. Also, throughout the holiday season there are lots of organizations of choice that can use a helping hand by slipping them a few bucks.
Has the Christmas holiday changed over the years? Uh-huh. Christmas at one time was so simple that one Santa Claus could work the whole town. Another thing, little kids are getting smarter and it’s harder to fool them. Seeing more than one of these hefty red faced guys with premature white beards can turn little ones off. However, the new breed of multi-Santas are serving a more realistic role by sort of portraying the spirit of Christmas. After all, it’s about time that the budding generation gets to know who is spending all the dough to make them happy.
I had read in the Sunday paper that kids have 78% more toys than they use. (Was every home canvassed?) It went on to say that with fewer things, the season has more of a chance for joy. "It's not a season to be burdened.”
Surplus toys never became a problem until the last couple of generations. The homemade and store boughten rag dolls of days gone by took a long time to revolve into the highly commercialized cabbage patch craze. Cast iron shaped toys, heavy enough to be used as weapons, were molded out. One bounced off my head when a playmate turned into a sore-head. Before plastic was invented, light weight inflammable celluloid dolls were also popular, but not very durable, and were always in danger of setting the house on fire. Especially when little girls would park their dolls alongside of the heating stove as a place to bed them down.
By using our imagination during the rag and celluloid days, we pre-space age kids enjoyed what toys we had. In our home, the high light of each beddy time during Christmas week was when the folks lit candles on the tree for about 10 minutes. It made sister and me happy. The sight of small candle flames dancing on the tree and the smell of pine and burning wax was an event we long remembered.
The Spokesman-Review · 22 Dec 1935, Sun
Comments
Post a Comment