Isn't it funny, the kinds of things that you can remember when there really isn't any reason to really remember them. This is the situation I was in when I was asked for one specific memory from a past Christmas.
The first thing that popped into my mind was Christmas morning 1960. I was 4 ½ years old and hadn't started school yet but wanted to more than anything else because everyone else (that counted) was there already.
Well Christmas morning was your normal crazy event that I think everyone enjoyed because I can remember the huge pile of paper that my sister and I got to clean up, after all the gifts were opened. The pile was bigger than I was.
Anyway there are three things that I can remember specific to that morning, the first was asking my parents how Santa got the presents into our apartment. You see we lived in a basement apartment and there was no chimney. Everybody knew that Santa always came down the chimney because all the stories said so. Well the explanation was simple, I was told that we had a magic chimney and fire place that only Santa could open and it was right there in the wall next to the window. End of explanation.
The next thing of importance was the yellow, red, and blue plastic cement truck that I got. It was big enough that I was able to put almost anything in it to mix it up.
Now the last memory that is also the sharpest is of the new pencils, big pink eraser,silver pencil sharpener, and most of all the two BALL POINT PENS. I had never seen such things as these and just knew that they were something special. One was blue and the other was green, they were of the retractable type (that I knew nothing about) with a wide bright silver band around the middle, just cheap plastic pens that everyone but me knew about. Well dad had to show me how to write with one and it was so awesome that I spent quite a while 'trying it out' on any piece of paper that I could find, even the new truck. Got in trouble for that one.
Mom suggested that I try the other one out for a while or I would use up that one so I went and found the other one in my stash. I found it and I couldn't get it to make any kind of mark at all, I called mom and told her that it didn't work but she and dad were busy and told me to wait a minute.
Well being like any almost 5 year old I wasn't willing to wait and thought of something that should make it work. I went over to my stash and tried to “sharpen my new pen with my 'pen'cil sharpener. That's what you did to get pencils to work. That should work, right? Nope, I put the pen in and gave it a good twist and heard a good loud crunchy grind in my hand and new right then that I should have waited. My parents came out of the kitchen just at that time and found me just standing there pen in the pencil sharpener being very sad over my brand new broken ball point pen.
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