Sporting goods made it on list

As a child my Christmas wish was always filled with the usual items.
Toys. Games. Movies. Candy.
Sometimes, a sporting good even popped up on my yearly list to Santa.
It often came in good use, too, especially during the wintertime.
With more than 20 kids in the neighborhood, we were always outside playing.
Whether it were baseball, football, basketball or some other game we invented, it seemed as if we spent more time outdoors than we did cooped up inside.
Around Christmas break, our outside activities were just more white — snow football, hockey, sledding, snowball fights.
While driving past the pond across from Haynes Park in Portland this weekend, memories of playing outdoors as a child popped in my head.
I noticed the pond starting to freeze over — hard to imagine with the warm spell we’ve had the last couple of days, but it was definitely cold Saturday and Sunday.
Every year, the back yard of my childhood home in Saginaw, Michigan, would flood from late fall rain. As the temperatures began to drop, the water froze and turned into a sheet of ice.
My house was on the outside corner of an oval subdivision, so our backyard was larger than most. The sheet of ice that appeared each winter made a perfect skating rink for my friends and I. That means I often asked Santa to bring me equipment to play hockey.
Skates. Gloves. Sticks. Pucks.
We never held back, either, not thinking twice about hip-checking someone into the snow.
We had the same mindset playing football in the field behind my house, or out on someone else’s front yard. At the Darks’ residence a few houses down, we shoveled the snow in the front yard to expose the grass, and put the snow along the sides to create barriers — like hockey boards, if you will. This allowed us to run makeshift tackling drills in the snow. The exposed grass was to get better grip. The “boards” along the sides were to help cushion the impact.
The soft snow wasn’t going to hurt.
But don’t tell that to Brittany, the girl across the street who got hit in the face by a chunk of ice during a snowball fight with the out-of-town grandson of one of the elderly couples in the area. Her injury put a quick halt to that short-lived, two-on-one battle.
As we got older, our winter activities changed, but the appearance of sporting goods did not disappear from the Christmas list.
About 8 miles from my house was a man-made ski slope, Apple Mountain, and when I was in high school my friends and I would be there nearly all day every day during Christmas break.
My list to Santa transformed from asking for hockey skates and sticks to skis and boots. One year, all I wanted was a season pass to Apple Mountain, knowing I’d get more use out of it than what it was worth.
Spending so much time on the slope forged friendships with kids from  bordering towns and other schools. We had the kids on snowboards, those that used skis, and then me, the kid with snowblades — shorter skis best used for doing tricks, but I wasn’t much of a daredevil.
While recollections of my childhood around Christmas time are fleeting, all it takes is the simple sight of a pond freezing over or a sledding hill to bring life to those memories.
As I spend time with my niece Taylor and nephew Alex this Christmas, I can only hope as they get older sporting goods continue to pop up on their list as well.
Maybe, whether on their lists or not, I’ll be the one to provide those types of gifts. That way, as they become adults they can look back on their childhood as I am now.
Merry Christmas.