Magic of Christmas doesn’t fade

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from Nov. 3, 2005. One of Jack’s Christmas traditions was writing stories for his children and later his grandchildren. Those stories continue to be shared, even after his passing. As we approach the holidays this year, think about your own traditions and how to make them meaningful, both today and long after you are gone.

Every year, when November rolls around, newspaper columnists feel it’s their duty to decry how much the Christmas season has been extended and how commercialized it’s become.

You know the pieces I’m talking about.

“No sooner do the Halloween displays come down than the Christmas displays go up.”

Fine. No argument from me. They’ve got a valid point.

But when November rolls around, I still find myself thinking about Christmas, commercialized or not.

A wave of nostalgia hits me soon after the first really hard frost, and I start thinking about the Wish Book, the Sears Christmas catalog which would be eagerly studied for hours and annotated with a complex series of hieroglyphics indicated who wanted what and how much they really wanted it. At our house, the Wish Book was a work in progress for weeks.

I start thinking about the Art Craft in Portland, always a haunt every Saturday when a kid got his allowance but even more of an attraction when the back room was filled with toys for Christmas.

Sure, it was stuff no one actually needed, but it was certainly stuff kids wanted.

(Who on earth can explain the appeal of a Jerry Mahoney ventriloquist dummy to a kid who had trouble talking clearly let alone throwing his voice?)

I start thinking about the old G.C. Murphy Store in Portland and the Danner’s 5 & 10 in Dunkirk, places that were part of the routine landscape most of the year but which took on special significance in kid-dom as Christmas approached. They even seemed to smell better in November and December.

I start thinking — even dreaming, to this day — about the toy department at Wolf and Dessauer’s department store in Fort Wayne. Seen in harsh, clear light 50 years later, it was probably a pretty humdrum place. But when you are six or seven years old, it was Valhalla.

Sure, the newspaper columnists are right, the season has been over-commercialized and stretched to the limit.

Catalogs have been filling up our mailbox for weeks, and TV commercials have been pitching Christmas gifts since early October.

But there’s just enough kid in me that I fall for the season’s allure every time.

By mid-December, of course, I’ll be weary of it. By then even the nostalgia will have worn thin.

But for now, for a few weeks, it’s all about anticipation, it’s all about remembering that same sense of anticipation in the past, and it’s all about believing this Christmas will be the best ever.

That’s part of the magic, and I’m still a sucker for it.