Christmas 1945
My First Remembrance

"Anoinette has said that at some point she wrested control of the putz from her mother and "had to direct," but I always let Mom do it. When I did it there were no surprises and I was never satisfied. She did stuff I wouldn't have thought of. She made the mirror lake and did the cotton and mica snow, created microcosms out of the simplest kind of junk, and I could never get the kind of terrain she could bring out of a common white bedsheet. The first time I watched her set up "The Village" there was no doubt in methat she ought to be doing it because she was CLEARLY the devine representative of "the place" where this amazing practice came from. I knew I was seeing something really serious that had been going on far before my time. I was so amazed that such a thing was in the World and my Mom was a chief practioner.

On December 8,1941, right after Pearl Harbor, - Dad rushed to downtown Sharpsburg to get a Lionel train.... an incredible extravagance. I don't know how he did it. It was early in his career and he was theoretically making $900 a year from two niggardly mission churches that seldom paid him, and driving school busses to pay the bills. There was a ferocious argument,"Peter, "The Boy" is six months old!" but he was adamant: "I want "The Boy" to have a real metal Christmas train before we can never get one anymore."
He was almost too late. The guy had no more sets and they scrounged one up from his last individual pieces.The "set" was a common 027 die cast steam engine with the non-whistling plastic tender that made a funny, hollow rattling sound, two of the cheaper lithographed freight cars with automatic couplers and a very high-end, super detailed near scale all metal lighted caboose - the exalted #2757, which only came with premium sets. God, how I loved that caboose, with it's ladders and stair steps and open platform ends and chimney and glowing windows! He also got a pair of electric switches, an uncoupler section and enough track to make an oval with a parallel siding. It was tense to run. Timing to avert derailing was about the tensest thing I had come up against. The stakes were high; it took a lot to get those hundred wheels back on the track again.

But I did not become aware of the train or village until I was about 4 and we had moved to Johnstown. Whether they kept the train stored thru the War because I was too small or set it up I don't know. I just knew that in that year my brain became alive and the magic of the tree and world beneath took hold of me forever. From the time Mom started setting up until it all came down I was part of it, beneath the tree. You couldn't get me out to play or to the table to eat. Those 8 humble, plain white Dolly Toy houses were magical.I remember two items in particular - a set of 3 paper mache" gray boulders with flat bottoms. I found those same 3 boulders at a flea market about 20 years ago , and for 50 cts., the most emotional find of my Christmas collecting career. (Picture on the left.) And this funny little alabaster/alum creche - a molded in nativity scene under a simple arch about 5" high. We kids used to lick it for the intense chemical taste. I found another one of those, too - and apparently other kids did the same, because in this one the nativity figures are all but dissolved away. Dad made a corner tunnel/mountain of chicken wire and plaster, and he built a super-detailed water tank from a scale railroader's 0-gauge kit. It was really complicated.

Johnstown is high up in the great Allegheny Mountains and gets ferocious winters. That was also the whitest Christmas that I ever knew. One, never-ending blizzard for weeks on end. I could not walk outside or sled in the deep snow. The cold was painful. Grandma and Grandpa Althof almost didn't make it down from Erie on the train; it stuck on the tracks someplace for 7 hours and they almost froze. The kitchen linoleum was always full of wet galoshes and puddles from the melting snow clumps on the floor. My socks were soaking all the time. The music on the radio was "White Christmas," and "Let it Snow let It Snow Let it Snow." It just kept coming. Visitors to the parsonage would stomp their boots and blow their hands and tell me, "Well, Santa Claus sure won't have no trouble getting through, all right!"
Dad was on the go a lot, fighting the coal furnace, fighting tire chains, filling and draining the radiator of the '39 Ford because you could not get anti-freeze. Driving anywhere was whiteness, tense and scary, but sometimes I went with him on his visitations. Soldier boys were dying. He was sad a lot. The slap of the tire chains, the Ford sliding sideways and about unable to see out the frosted windows. I discovered that other people set up trains and villages, too, so I was impressed all the more. What a big deal this really was! But mostly I stayed happily cocooned at home with my own Christmas World. There was baking going on. Dad was not sad all the time ...

And Santa did get through "all right." I don't remember what I got that year. What I do remember is I've never had a Christmas to compare with that again."
*****