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Remembering the toys of Christmas

The weeks of anticipation leading up to Christmas Day are an exciting time for a child, no matter the decade.

By this time of year, in the sixties, the Christmas edition of the Sears, Roebuck and Company catalog would have already arrived. The pages would be bent, dog-eared, and torn by now from many little hands eagerly turning the pages, dreaming about what Santa might bring them on Christmas morning.

My older sister told me that when the Christmas catalog arrived in the mail, my dad would jokingly tell her that she could get any toy she wanted from that catalog.

Did she get it – no. Did she think she would get it – no. But she said it was still nice to dream.

Along with dreaming, I also had a practical use for the Sears catalog – homemade paper dolls.

First, I would find a page advertising underclothing for girls. I would carefully cut out a girl from that page and glue it onto cardboard. Then I would leaf through the catalog and find beautiful dresses and other clothing, which would “sort of fit” on that little girl’s body. I would cut out those items of clothing, and cut tabs out around them to bend over, so they could hold onto my “homemade” cardboard paper doll.

So that Sears Wishbook catalog provided weeks of “free” fun for me. And long after Christmas was over, the catalog was then consigned to the outhouse for yet another practical use, which some of you may remember.

Even though we rarely received the grand toys that were advertised in the catalog, on Christmas morning it was evident that Santa’s sleigh had found its way onto the rooftop of the wooden frame two-story house that sat next to the back tracks.

Sitting under the heavily tinseled Christmas tree were wonderful games like Monopoly or Twister. Or maybe you would get a Mr. Potato Head, a can of Lincoln Logs, an Etch-a-Sketch, or maybe a plastic View-Master.

When you inserted the thin round disk into the View-Master camera and pulled down on the plastic lever, you were taken to far-away realistic worlds. It was the sixties version of 3-D virtual reality.

And the dolls – oh the dolls! Maybe your dolly would even be fed with a little bottle where the milk magically disappeared as the doll “drank” her milk, like my baby sister had.

I remember getting a small metal xylophone one year, which you played with a wooden mallet.

But my absolute favorite gift was a thick Shirley Temple’s Storybook, which held lovely stories, such as “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” I loved this book dearly, and still read it to this very day.

My older brother said his favorite gift was a white plastic Roy Rogers toy guitar, with red trim and plastic strings. He treasured it so much that he even carried it a mile to school for Miss Morgan’s first grade show-and-tell.

Now – how in the world did Santa know that I would go on to become an avid reader? And how did Santa know that my brother would go on to be a life-long guitarist and musician, who still plays in many bands, including The Deacons of Dixieland, PHILZ, and the Lockport Drifters?

I guess Santa always knows.

To get a more comprehensive perspective for this column on Christmas toys, I decided to ask two “sixty-something” friends what Christmas toys they remembered.

The first friend said the one gift he could remember was a silver-colored metal toy cap gun. It came with a holster that he wore around his waist, a cowboy shirt, and a sheriff’s badge.

With a far-away look in his eyes, he remembered, “We got what we got. It wasn’t much, but we were glad to have it.”

And when I asked my sister-in-law the same question about long-ago Christmas toys, she had a similar response. She came up with two favorite gifts – a Slinky and Pick Up Stix.

Slinkys were metal springs that you played with, back-and-forth, in the palms of your hands – or put at the top of the steps so they could “walk” down. Pick Up Stix were thin colorful wooden sticks, kind of like toothpicks, only longer. You tossed the sticks into a pile, and then took turns trying to remove the sticks – one by one – until the pile collapsed. The person who caused the pile to fall was the loser of the game.

Remembering her childhood Christmas toys, she said wistfully, “They were simple toys. We didn’t get a lot. We just got a few things, but we were real happy.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

——

Rose Hoover is a freelance writer for The Express. She can be reached at rosehovr@yahoo.com or 814-387-4016.

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