Tom STAFFORD
COMMENTARY
Decades of mold and dust rendered about a quarter of them unsalvageable.
But the old Ektachrome slides my brother sent me this summer as we readied for our parents’ 60th anniversary held some treasures, including early Christmas photos.
In one series from the basement of our house on Hathaway Street in Livonia, Mich., my brother stares over a train layout spread over a large piece of plywood on which we’d soon add buildings with modeling clay.
With the same bright blue basement paint as a backdrop, I appear radiant, just having received my all time favorite stuffed animal: Jinx the cat.
A slide from a few years later shows our grandparents’ home in the Upper Peninsula.
It was the year I got a set of Red Wings hockey gloves I treasured. That same year I held to my guns, refusing to tell my grandmother what I got her for Christmas, despite her offer to reveal what she got for me.
The result was the astounding sense of surprise she surely felt while opening another bottle of pink body lotion.
Beneath the tree are two holiday cartons of cigarettes: Winstons for my grandfather, Salems for my father.
(Historical footnote: at the time, neither had to take out a payday loan to buy them in that quantity.)
My grandma in those days had the latest Goodyear or Firestone Christmas album, and her house was decorated with Santas she made out of plastic Roman Cleanser bottles and Christmas trees rendered from scissored and spray painted Readers Digests.
In the slides, my parents are slender and my dad has less gray hair than I do now. And as the slides progress, I see two boys growing from cuteness into awkwardness, through the time when the largeness of early Christmases set the stage for disappointment when the magic seems to go missing.
Not in the slides are other Christmases I remember:
Christmases we spent in our larger house on Sherwood Drive that always began with midnight candlelight services and then trips home for the opening of gifts and playing the home version of Jeopardy.
Christmases during which my parents replaced table hockey games my brother and I had worn out.
Today, euchre is the Christmas game at our house.
‘A Christmas Story’ with Ralphie and the Red Rider BB Gun is a staple. Favorite moments include the thump of the cleaver as it separates the Christmas duck from its neck, the fa-ra-ra-ra-ras from the Chinese waiters, and the bowling ball’s ominous landfall in Darren McGaven’s lap.
As substitutes for my grandfather’s chocolate covered cherries and my grandma’s Whitman’s Sampler, I make a last-minute trip for the little amaretto and hazelnut chocolate cordials.
My grandparents are long gone now, of course, and my parents older. But like those times, they are still with me and have grown into a treasured, unexpected gift that’s been unwrapped by time.