To the editor:
A friend in the Houlton area recently wrote to me of the hype over Black Friday and the stores opening Thursday night, “It used to be the Christmas catalogue from Sears didn’t even come until Thanksgiving week. I can remember my brother and me poring over the toys. It was a big thing.”
Was it ever! Sears had the thickest one; Montgomery Ward was next in size. Then came Spiegel’s and Alden’s. The latter two often had different dolls to drool over, but when an order went in, the stock was out. No back order, no hope for the future. Just give up and hurry elsewhere. Choice was limited locally and Bangor seemed much farther away then.
A favorite Christmas memory is of a morning out at the lake with my stocking well filled, but nothing big under the tree. My gift would arrive late, maybe not for a few days. Then Porter called the post office just in case, and was told, “Try back a little later.” The next time it had arrived, so Ina, Leonard and I piled into the Ford and Porter drove us into town to pick up the black doll carriage and a grown-up doll somewhat larger than a Barbie, dressed in a grey faux Chinchilla fur coat and matching pillbox hat.
I called the new doll Connie long before I would hear of my cousin Connie down in Carmel. The doll joined others on a small cedar chest opposite the foot of my bed: Bonnie, a small rubber baby, had a little hole in her mouth and another elsewhere. She came with her own bottle and a diaper, best removed when using the bottle. Patsy was a big baby doll wearing a white dress with tiny embroidered flowers across the top. Charlene had a deep red snowsuit trimmed in white bunny fur.
Leonard received a big metal dump truck with buckets on a chain belt that was moved up around and down with a crank. Sand or anything we put into the buckets was dumped out into the truck. Leonard could make believe he was at the gravel pit out at Cary Mills and come summer, we could use the truck in the sand pile out in back of the cottage on the Peabody side.
Santa stuffed our long cotton stockings and once left doctor’s and nurse’s kits underneath. I believed in him right into sixth grade. That was the year I snooped in a bag and saw the dresser set with a metallic red finish on the mirror and brush from French’s drugstore.
Christmas morning I opened a package left under my stocking and saw…oh, no! As I looked up, Ina said, “I told you not to snoop.”
So much for a lesson learned — at least ‘til high school when I discovered a little perfume lamp that Leonard had ordered for me. It was red glass, so cute, really different. He caught me, said I’d not receive it. I never snooped again.
Now the big catalogues arrive no more and the postal service has changed. But the Christmas spirit of our youth lives on. So does Santa. Merry Christmas, everyone!
Byrna Porter Weir
Rochester, N.Y.
