COMMENTARY

It is always a joy, a real pleasure and a privilege to facilitate bringing the wishes and delights of the Christmas season from the hearts and minds of local school children into print for families and readers to enjoy, cherish, and possibly, take heed (hint, hint). You will find the Chronicle’s annual Christmas Tradition in this week’s edition, the special section devoted to letters to Santa, poems and other Christmas-season prose from Dayton students in classes from preschool through Sixth Grade, brought to you thanks to the support of our local businesses.

At their tender ages, their wishes and desires are simple and unadorned…at least in the lower grades. With today’s screen-centric society, technology’s latest “must-have” will always be at or near the top of the list for many school kids as they progress from dolls and toy trucks to things that take batteries and software upgrades.

This is also a season where we relive and remember those rosy days of yesteryear when we were kids with worries of our own: will someone make fun of my hair? or does she like me? or will I get to play in tonight’s game?

Pretty conventional worries from the same place but a different time. How times have changed....

In that simpler time, daily tribulations were wiped away by flopping on your belly in the front room with the three-inch-thick Sears catalog and earmarking pages that you hoped your parents, subordinates of Santa Claus (yes, we did get presents from Santa Claus at our Christmases), would see.

Those were golden hours, spent checking out the plastic guns, sleds, G.I. Joes and model cars. Pew! I always skipped past the pinkish pages with frilly dolls and baby carriages and Betsy Wetsy. My folks were always busy with the newspaper, their social commitments, and herding my brother, sister and me through the hurdles of grade school, junior high and high school…but they always seemed to mysteriously come through by December 24.

Our Christmas Eves were always spent with the McKinneys, either at our house or theirs, enjoying a Christmas Eve dinner and, if we were at McKinneys, watching them open one present that night, because their family opened presents on Christmas morning while ours was a Christmas Eve tradition. I still have a small paper box with jewelers screwdrivers that Mrs. McKinney gave me as a present. They come in handy from time to time and I always think of her.

My grandmother would usually fly to Pendleton from Colorado for a couple weeks, and we were treated to her delicious German dishes. We loved her kraut bierocks, home-made egg noodles, rivel kuchen (coffee cake), ebelskivers and maldodgers. She didn’t have a written recipe nor did she measure anything like flour, salt or whatever, from thousands of repetitions, she knew how to make enough for the family and a few leftovers. I regret not sticking by her side, learning how to cook those things.

One of our best Christmases was the year the men from our church went to gettin’ Christmas trees in the Blue Mountains. As a gag, they picked a Charlie Brown tree and delivered it to our porch. A beautiful tree was put in the back yard so we’d have a nice one to use after the laughter subsided.

My father was not to be out-joked by his peers. This gangly tree, which made my sister cry, was set up in the living room and pathetically decorated with a few bulbs and some lights, and us kids were dressed hillbilly style for that year’s Baker Family Christmas Card.

We lived in a house with lath and plaster walls, which made putting up posters of Jimi Hendrix (my brother), Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees (my sister) and Superman (me) kind of a challenge and it also wasn’t good for the walls. (The Superman poster, now long gone, has a value of $2,500. Sigh.)

That year, Dad had the local contractor custom make four-foot square cork boards with a nice wooden frame for us to post our favorite stuff on, rather than muck up the walls with thumb tacks and tape. On each of our bulletin boards were envelopes, and we each opened them, in order of oldest to youngest, one at a time.

In each envelope was a riddle, the solving of which would result in the location of said present. That was the year I received an 8 h.p. Briggs and Stratton engine for a hovercraft I was building in the garage. What a present! I had reached the limit of my woodworking skills and was at the point where doing the problem solving of a motor mount and all was above my pay grade. A sixth grader ain’t no good at welding, fabricating aluminum and operating a radial arm saw without a lot of help. Unfortunately, the plans for the hovercraft were tossed in a garage cleaning session, unbeknownst to me, and the fuselage eventually broken into pieces as the fumes of growing up overtook my passion for finishing the vehicle.

That was one of the most memorable Christmases and it was in The Best Years of Our Lives.