On the Eighth Day of . . .

(entry for 1/1/2025)

I never believed in Santa. I was told from year one that he was imaginary, and I never doubted it was true. For one thing there was one of them on every street corner, and no two alike, so how could he possibly be real!

I felt sorry for kids who did believe, because they were so obviously backward in their ways.

Along with Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph with his Nose So Bright, and all the other famous non-religious seasonal characters, Santa was sort of a joke. Sure, I went and sat on his lap and had my picture taken. And then we went to the next Department Store and did it all over again, with a different Santa. And then another. Etc. It was fun, and the lights were pretty, and the music was nice to listen to, and that was all that mattered. We sang all the carols, both the religious and the non-religious ones, and mixed them up with each other sometimes. It was a nice time of year, and the cold was invigorating, and we played in the snow. And that was it.

It was also explained to me early on that Jesus was not born anywhere near December 25. Shepherds in their fields in the middle of winter?!? Give me a break! No, he was born sometime in October, close to my dad’s birthday. What we celebrated in December was a pagan holiday and had nothing to do with a baby in a manger. (Not that shepherds in their fields would be there in October either, but that crucial fact was ignored!)

If not for the photos my mom took every year, I would have no memory whatsoever of any of the Christmas presents I got, those early years. I do remember fondly many of the birthday presents I received, and even more strongly the ten pacifying presents, one every day, that I got while my mom was in the hospital in May of 1944, having my sister. But Christmas? Nah. They all just sort of merged together.

From the age of six, I was in love with Lionel Trains. We saw working displays of them every Christmas at Denver Dry Goods department store, up on the top floor with the other toys, though I could not think of Lionels as toys. My dad had given me his used layout, but his pre-war locomotive and cars were unrealistic in the extreme, compared to the ‘modern’ ones. Lionel had shut down during the Second World War, or rather, had turned its factories into ones for munitions, but once the war was over, the trains returned, and every year I yearned for one. I was told we couldn’t afford it. Which we actually could have. By the time I got one, we couldn't!

The 1949 Lionel Catalog Cover

I say I had no memory of those early presents, and that’s true up to 1949. Then, suddenly, the best one I ever got showed up. I knew it was coming. I had picked it out of the Lionel catalog. I even knew how much it had cost my mom to buy it, because the price was printed right there in the catalog where I picked it out! My first train (that is, the first one of my very own) cost exactly $57, which was a fortune in 1949. There was an eight-drive-wheel locomotive, with fake steam coming out of the smokestack; a ‘tender’ that made the most god-awful honking sound that did not at all resemble a steam whistle; a working milk car that had a little guy on a magnet who shoved similarly magnetic milk cans out onto a loading platform; a similarly working log car that could tip its tiny logs out into a sort of dish on the floor; a maroon hopper car, non working; a single-dome silver oil tanker featuring a couple of brands of oil I had never heard of; and a lighted Lionel Lines caboose. (I later added a working coal car with bags of tiny black plastic rocks and a bright yellow non-working cattle car.) There was a non-working (thank goodness!) water tower to refill the imaginary locomotive tank for the steam supply, a bridge for the train to rattle across, and a thirty-one inch by fifty-eight inch oval three-rail track for the train to run around on. The set did not include a transformer, but fortunately the one my dad had owned worked fine. (My son still has all this, and the still-working engine alone is now worth about $400!)

My train is the top one, though they don't show the oil car that was included, and they show the hopper car in dark gray rather than the maroon one I got.

I was enthralled, and I played with it for hours at a time, until the rest of the family got bored and felt neglected in comparison.

Within a few days, one of the couplers on the log car stoped working, so it had to go at the end of the train, after the caboose. (I eventually did buy a replacement coupler, but never replaced it!) One of the knobs on the transformer broke, but the other three all still worked, so, since there was only the one train, there were two knobs to spare.

That was our first Christmas in Montrose and my dad’s income had gone from a high of $800 a month in 1946 to less than $200 a month by 1949, so all of this (along with a $51 doll for my sister) was very much beyond his ability to pay for, so my mom did. Where she got the money she wouldn’t say then, and never did, and I probably don’t want to know. The train was the only present I got that year, but I was happy as a clam, and didn’t miss the usual pile of wrapped packages at all. (The train had been presented unwrapped, on the basis that I knew what it was anyway, so why try to disguise it!)

We always opened our presents on Christmas Eve, never on Christmas Day, I’m not sure why. Maybe partly to disprove the Santa-coming-down-the-chimney at midnight story. By the time I got the train fully set up that night it was almost eleven. And by the time I went to bed it was after one, but I couldn’t sleep even then. I had a train! And it was a Lionel! I was in heaven. I didn’t miss Santa at all.

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