Christmas conjures many memories

Christmas is about memories.

Memories like:

•Waiting for my father to shave. While all the kids were up early on Christmas morning, no one was allowed downstairs until Dad was finished with his morning routine. That meant waiting on the landing while we listened to his Norelco buzz in the bathroom.

•Watching my in-laws unwrap their presents slowly and carefully so that the wrapping paper could be re-used. In my family, we tore through the paper, making me wonder if this difference in philosophy might undermine our marriage. (It didn’t.)

•Years as a teenager when I was able to put silver dollars in the Christmas stockings of others thanks to tips from my newspaper route customers.

•My first wristwatch. It was a Timex — of course — but I was about 10 and thought it was the coolest thing ever, kind of an early signal that I might actually someday become an adult.

•A long and dangerous drive to my in-laws home in Illinois on Christmas Eve when temperatures were something like 20 below zero. (You could look it up. It’s true.)

•The Christmas not too many years ago when my uncle — the late Stuart Ronald — showed up at the office to give me an HO train set. Stu had worked at one point in the toy department at Sears in Fort Wayne and always had a fondness for model trains. When the post-Christmas sales hit, he couldn’t help himself and accumulated a bunch of the sets made for Christmas morning. I was honored and delighted to receive one. Who knows? I may set it up again this year.

•Going out as a family to cut down our Christmas tree. The Fennig family had a tree lot near Bryant for a while, and there was another just over the Jay-Randolph county line. Inevitably there was a certain amount of squabbling over which tree to pick, but when you’re a dad lying down in the snow and muck and working the saw as your wife and kids look on, it amounts to a very special moment. Something to savor, and maybe a Christmas gift all its own.

•Surprising my wife with a painting we had been admiring in an upstairs gallery at a camera shop in Richmond. It was a spectacular autumn scene with wet trunks of beech trees on a hillside of fallen leaves. I asked to have it delivered to my parents’ house, so she had no idea what was behind the wrapping paper.

•The Christmas vacation in college when I worked as a volunteer at Richmond State Hospital. I engraved patient numbers into eyeglasses and sets of dentures for a couple of weeks and encountered patients in every single ward of that facility. It proved to be invaluable when it came to providing perspective.

•The guilt I felt when I peeked. Every kid knows that if you sort of stretch tissue paper wrapping, you can see what’s inside. But boy do you feel lousy when you read what’s on the box. The surprise evaporates. The guilt lingers.

•My years as a shepherd at the Christmas Eve service. I never seemed to graduate to Wise Man, let alone to playing the role of Joseph. Maybe there was something about my bathrobe that seemed to say, this guy’s a shepherd.

•Singing Christmas carols at Miller’s Merry Manor in Dunkirk with deputy prosecutor George Lopez leading the action and maintenance man/retired cop Arnold Clevenger on guitar. The smiles were our reward, and there were plenty of smiles. Of all the things the pandemic has taken away, this one may be the most painful.

•”Deck Us All With Boston Charlie.” When I was growing up, my family was a Pogo family. That meant we read the Pogo cartoon in the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette (even if I didn’t always understand it) and we owned a copy of the Pogo Songbook. It was a delight, especially at Christmastime when we’d gather around the piano while my mother played and sang the Pogo parody of “Deck the Halls.” I can’t sing it for you now, but I’ll offer this sample: “Deck us all with Boston Charlie, Walla-walla wash and Kalamazoo, Nora’s freezing on the trolley …” You get the picture.

Merry Christmas, and may all your memories be bright.

Stay safe. We’ve got another year in front of us.