This is the morning for the most anticipatory tree kiddos have seen since, well, since last Dec. 25. For quite some time, the wrapped packages have been merely a tease, enticements, but this morning there will be the big revelations once the wrapping paper is thrust aside.
I have my own memories of those childhood Christmas mornings around the tree from so very long ago. My hope, of course, was that each box would either contain a toy, a game or some type of sporting equipment rather than socks and underwear, the Christmas equivalents of those Halloween humbugs who used to try to slip an apple or an orange into your pillowcase instead of a Milky Way or Snickers.
Not long ago, while working and going through a garage-door manufacturing plant doing my housekeeping inspection, I had a definite flashback to my early Christmas mornings, and the trigger for those memories was the strongest of our senses when it comes to eliciting thoughts of our yesterdays, my sense of smell.
The aroma came from an adhesive used in the garage door-making process that smelled exactly like model airplane glue. The smell of that glue not only brought me back to my childhood Christmas mornings when I generally would receive at least one model car, battleship or plane to practice my assembly and painting skills.
While I always was excited when I saw the colorful box with the image of what I was expected to create, especially because it wasn’t in the clothing category, I think somewhere in the back of my mind, given my track record in putting together an attractive finished model, there were the seeds that would grow into disappointment when it came time for assemblage.
My eventual attempts, I suppose, were harbingers of future traits to be filed under “F” for foibles, my impatience and my lack of mechanical aptitude.
For those of you who may have stumbled upon this column and are under the age of 55 or so, you may need a little primer on what was once quite popular for boys some six decades ago.
The models to which I refer were not like the action figures or scale cars of today, ones that come fully assembled. Our boxes contained nondescript gray plastic parts of miniature planes, ships and cars with the various pieces loosely attached to what were called parts trees. Each box came with assembly instructions as well as some decals to apply on the finished product once it was painted. The paint and detail brushes, of course, had to be bought separately.
While I did manage to assemble my models, I will admit, it wasn’t unusual to have a piece or two left over, which should never be the case, and my finished products generally had glue smudges, dried paint blobs and slightly off-center decals that never were on the images on the boxes.
I knew how meager my efforts were when it came to those models when I would go to my pals’ houses and see what they’d managed to put together. While I’d rationalize by telling myself there must have been some parental involvement, deep down I knew that probably wasn’t true. In my childhood, there simply wasn’t much parental intervention when it came to how we little folks employed our leisure time, which suited us just fine.
Further proof of my substandard work came during our magical summers, when those good Sisters of Charity at St. Charles let the monkeys out. Sometime during early July, when fireworks were all the rage, one of my pals would find a way to obtain some alluring and illicit contraband, firecrackers!
As any boy of the early 1960s will tell you, there was nothing more fun than sneaking a Lucky or a Camel out of one of our father’s packs and attaching a cigarette fuse to a firecracker to blow up some models out in the woods far from disapproving parental eyes.
When it came time for that, generally my pals would suggest that my models be the ones that should be blown up since they were easily the worst looking. And, you know what? I wasn’t offended. Really, it was an easy call!
As I drove back from that Indiana garage-door manufacturing plant, all those thoughts rolled through my mind, in a narrative from so long ago that began on early Christmas mornings not much different in many respects than this morning. The story’s exposition was the unwrapping of those models, and the climax was their mid-summer dates with destruction.
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