It's Christmas....Thank God for Kids!

One of my favorite songs is "Thank God for Kids," made popular by the Oak Ridge Boys a few years ago.  It went like this:

                    If it weren't for kids have you ever thought
                    There wouldn't be no Santa Clause
                    Look what the stork just brought
                    Thank God for Kids
                    We'd all live in a quiet house
                    Without Big Bird or a Mickey Mouse
                    And Kool-aid on the couch
                    Thank God for Kids
                    Thank God for kids there's magic for a while
                    A special kind of sunshine in a smile
                    Do you ever stop to think? or wonder why?
                    The nearest thing to Heaven is a child

Although these words always apply, they take on a special meaning at this time of the year.  Christmas itself is about a kid (the baby Jesus) and kids are what the spirit of giving is all about.  It doesn't matter the age or size of the kid either.  We're all kids.  Nothing gave my parents more pleasure than giving gifts to my brother and I at Christmas, even after we were adults.  The same with my wife and I.  Our kids are grown and we still enjoy watching them open their Christmas gifts today. 

Our grandchildren are very special to us.  We love watching the delight on their faces when they get their gifts.  Our family tradition has them coming over to our house on Christmas Eve to share the giving with us but Christmas morning belongs to our son and daughter-in-law.  They get to watch their beautiful daughters open their gifts at home.  We usually "drop by" a little later on Christmas day to see what they got but the delight in watching them get their "gifts from Santa" belongs to them, just as it belonged to us years ago.

It's gotta be tough to shop for a kid these days.  There doesn't seem to be any inexpensive toys like a hula hoop or simple toy truck.  Now the kids gotta have cell phones and (not OR, AND) ipods and laptops and blackberries or iphones.  As if this wasn't a problem enough, they usually get these things throughout the year....not just at Christmas and this makes it doubly-hard to find them a present. 

I remember Christmas at our humble house in the forties and fifties and how fortunate we were to even have such a holiday.  My Mom & Dad would have extended family members come over on Christmas Eve and we'd exchange gifts and eat endless snacks and they would let us open ONE major gift that night.  It was very exciting and loads of fun.  Our extended family was my Aunt Ruby, Patsy (her daughter) and Phillip Sparks and their four kids DD, Bryan, Cindy and Sherry.  After we got through over at our house, we always traveled the two blocks over to Phillip and Patsy's house to watch them open their main gifts (the ones we had to wait until Christmas morning to open).  This usually happened around 9 or 10 pm and afterwards Mom would take my brother and I to midnight mass at St. Joseph's.  We used to think she was doing this to hear the beautiful Christmas music but later we found out she did it so Dad could round up all of our Christmas Morning gifts and assemble the ones that needed assembling.  I didn't find this out until a few years later when we waited until Christmas morning to go to mass because it became too difficult for Mom to stay up until midnight.

Bub (my brother) and I would always wake up around 5:30 am on Christmas morning and head for the tree.  Our small living room looked like a cornucopia spilling out with toys.  Since the two of us were only eighteen months apart, Mom and Dad always purchased two of everything.  If I got a BB gun, so did Bub.  If he got a new Swiss Army Knife, so did I.  That stopped a light of fighting at our house.   I remember well when dad got the two of us a hatchet each.  We were active in scouting then and this was a basic necessity for a scout (come to think of it, one of our other presents that year was a new boy scout uniform).  We couldn't wait for the sun to come up and after breakfast we'd head out to the back yard.  We chopped down everything in sight including some of the branches on Mom's "prized" snowball bush.  Unlike gifts today, we kept those hatchets until we graduated from high school.  Mom always got us things like toy soldiers (not GI Joes...but the little toy soldiers that came with about 100 of them in a cellophane bag) while Dad liked to get us things that would eventually get us in trouble like BB guns (or in later years .22 rifles).  We always got presents on our birthdays and Christmas - only those two days; if we wanted anything else during the year we had to work for it and purchase it ourselves (in hindsight that wasn't too bad of an idea).  Those simple and traditional Christmases are forever etched into my memory.

One of the most special Christmases in my life came when I was about six or seven years old.  Dad would give each of us $2.00 to do our own Christmas shopping.

Mom would take us to two stores....J. J. Newberry's and Ben Franklin's, the two variety stores located downtown (conveniently called "five and dime" stores).  She would accompany us into the store but once inside, she'd go to the furniture section or cosmetics and leave us alone to shop.  We would purchase presents for Dad and her, Pa & Dada (our grandparents), Ruby (our aunt) and each other.  With both Mom and Bub in the store, we'd purchase and pay for one item at a time so the cashier could "sack it," making it invisible to it's intended receiver.  For $2.00 you didn't get a lot of major stuff but we always made it work.  We'd get items like a comb for a nickle and a water pistol for a quarter...things like that!  I remember that particular year Newberrys had a bottle of colored water (called "toilette" water) in a tiny container that resembled a Tiffany lamp.  I thought it was the most beautiful thing for a lady I had ever seen and I was determined to get it for my Mom even though it cost an astounding seventy-nine cents.  That didn't leave a lot of money for everyone else but I had to have it for her so I purchased it.  It was still on the dresser in her bedroom when she died nearly fifty years later.  I still have it today but it's in a storage box.

I always enjoyed assembling model cars when I got a little older so getting me Christmas gifts was easy during those years.  I usually got three or four of them and had them put together by the end of Christmas day.  About the biggest (and most expensive) present I remember either of us getting was one Christmas my brother got a new Western Flyer bicycle (it was just like the one Pee Wee Herman rode in Pee Wee's Big Adventure).  I already had a bicycle that my grandfather gave me the previous September for my birthday.  Since I already had a bicycle, Mom & Dad got me a Lionel electric train or something like that of equal value.  That was the beginning of us getting different presents each year instead of the same thing.

Years later after Pat & I married and had kids, I came to appreciate what my parents did for us.  When Terry (our oldest) was little, we continued going to Dad & Mom's house on Christmas eve.  We'd let him open one major gift (just like we got to do as boys).  Because Phillip and Patsy's kids were nearly grown and we needed to get Terry in bed so Santa could come, we'd then go back to our own home.  Terry was never sleepy and it seemed there wasn't much that we could do that would make him sleepy.  Just like Dad, we always hid his presents in the trunk of our car.  I worked at Lester Motors during those years and usually drove a demonstrator.  A lot of times when a customer needed to leave their car in the shop for repairs it wasn't uncommon for us to loan them our demonstrator to drive and we'd drive one of the trade-ins home.  One particular Christmas I had hidden Terry's presents in the trunk of my demo and loaned it to a couple on Christmas eve.  When I discovered what I had done, I kept trying to call them but they weren't home.  Turns out they had gone to Owensboro to visit family and didn't get back until about 8 p.m.  I had to go over to their house and retrieve Terry's christmas.  It was pretty scary because cell phones weren't invented yet (at least for us common folk) so I had to wait until they returned home so I could reach them by telephone.  Everything turned out OK though.

In those early days of technology we didn't have cable or sattlelite dishes that would get 150 channels.  We had cable but it only got about ten channels (of course it only cost about $5.00 per month, too).  After the 10 p.m. news went off, everyone at the local stations and even the networks went home to be with their families, save an engineer or two.  The only thing on was various midnight masses that climaxed with the Mother of all Midnight Masses, the one by the Pope at the Vatican.  None of these was in English and there was an excessive amount of "chanting."  This is what I had to watch while I tried to stay awake while I waited for Terry to go to sleep.  Since Terry never got to sleep before 1:00 am, it was a "grueling" three hours to say the least. 

When I was convinced he was sound asleep, I'd slip down into the garage (it was in our basement) and get his presents out.  This usually took three or four trips down and up two flights of stairs so I was worn out by the time I got them upstairs.  I would begin by placing the ones that need no assembly and strategically place them around and under the tree.  Then I would find the ones that needed no assembly but needed batteries installed in them and take care of that chore.  Last but not least I would get the ones out that required some assembly.  Most of these would be the equivalent of getting a new Toyota in a box with the saying "some assembly required" on them. 

Remember those small service stations that were so popular back when we were kids ourselves.  They were still popular when Terry was a kid.  We got him one of those...you know the one with the various ramps that allowed you to drive to the roof and that had a plastic elevator in the middle of it, not to mention an operational grease rack.  This thing had twelve pages of instructions and potato chip sized sack of tiny parts that affixed to it somewhere.  I had to learn to stick tab B into slot C and all kinds of complicated stuff like that.  It took me until 4 am just to get it assembled and I hadn't even started assembling the bicycle yet.  I'd usually climb in bed around

5:00 am, doze off by 5:15 and Terry would come drag me back into the living room by 5:30.  It was always my job to take pictures of him opening the presents...that's why our Christmas pictures were always "blurred."  Still, the look on his face made it all worthwhile.  When Brad came along, I had trained Terry to assemble all of his toys and the same with when we had J. P.   I taught Brad to assemble his. 

Now the assembly process is different.  Most things come assembled but it takes a PhD get them operational.  We went to Pat's boss's Christmas party the other night.  Her employees "pooled" their money and purchased her something called a "Wii Fit."  This thing hooked into her television and it took about an hour and a half to get it up and running.  It contained something called a "pad" that was wired to the converter box and it was operated with a wireless remote.  It was supposed to help you get fit by giving you various exercise routines to do as you watched a computerized robot representing you "working out" as you did the same.  When she got on top of the "pad" the stupid robot began yelling at her about her stance and how she was placing too much weight on one leg which created bad posture.  I thought to myself, "that's all I need...another wife telling me everything I'm doing wrong!"  No Thanks, if I need another wife I'll just move to Utah and marry one.  I wonder how long it'll be before they invent something similar called the "Wii Baby Maker."  Well, you get the idea.

Christmas eve will bring our family to our house again this year.  I'm looking forward to it.  We'll eat and fellowship and exchange gifts.  It'll be over and done by 9:00 pm and everyone will go their own way.  We'll put the dishes in the dishwasher and pick up the wrappings and sort the gifts the kids left for us.  By 10:30 I'll be in bed.  I hope Terry enjoys watching Midnight Mass in latin and hope the "chanting" doesn't give him an "earworm."  I'll check in on Christmas morning.