2000-05-22 - 01:49:52

May 21, 2000

Noel

There was only one kind of shopping I liked and that was Christms shopping while I was very young. There were the wreaths, garlands and ornaments strung from lamp post to lamp post, many of the department stores had animated Christmas displays. One of the favorites was "Santa's Workshop" All the little elves hammering or sawing and doing things that could be animated. Back then there were people who were professional window dressers, those days people could be enticed to enter the store by the attractively displayed merchandise in the show windows. The window dressers always outdid themselves at Christmas time and it was like going through a country of enchantment.

That was just the prelude. At that time of year entire departments of a store would be under stocked and squeezed to one side to make room for the glistening, sparkling TOYS !

During that very short period of innocence I had a passport to boy heaven, occasionally I would notice girls trespassing in my land and carefully put them under my watchful eye to see that they went to the doll area. I would stare and drool at every fantastic new toy, I would spend a long time at the big area where they had the electric train running pretending that I was the engineer on that train. Mentally I would dream my way around my country running that wonderful train which operated under my command and went where I desired. Eventually I would be pried away with the sound like that of a large nail being pulled. On the way though my toy magnet would draw me to one counter or another. Mother would tell me, "If you aren't a nice boy, I won't bring you here next year." Jeepers, a threat meant nothing to a boy fast in the arms of imagination and frenzied greed. That was in the future, dim into the unrealized reaches of the grown up's calendar - - here was now.

Mother would be very tired by the time she had pulled me from the shop show windows on the way to catch a streetcar. On the way home as the tram would rock along I would begin to nod from (sensual ?) overload and proceed to exist in a dream world where I possessed every single thing I had seen and was playing with all of them simultaneously. Oh, I had big, grandiose pink, cotton candy cloud dreams. When it came time for us to get off the tram Mother would gently arouse me, still in my Christmas dream I would ask Mother, "Where are we ?" She would quietly reply, "Home, sweetie." Whether it was daytime or dark Mom would give me a bite to eat and I would have a long nap or a nights sleep depending on what time it was when we got home. Pine scented dreams of Radio Flyers heaped with toys coming to my door.

Christmas feasting passed with me consuming just enough food to last until the next meal while still in my mind I was playing with my new stuff. How precious and how short is the age of innocence, that time which to a child stretches out into infinity. On a look back from middle age, one realizes just how short a time passed before the fevered, hormonal dreams of puberty changed the outlook on the world and its female population. Just changing the dreams of the innocent to the dreams of pending procreation.

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