All aboard!

With horror, I look at the calendar Only a week until Christmas Eve! Naturally, I haven't even started my shopping. Actually, this year will be easier than most. My family, now almost entirely adult, has adopted the salutary procedure of drawing names, so that each person buys just one present for just one other person -- a donee who won't know the identity of his benefactor until presents are opened. (The few remaining munchkins in the family are exempted from this -- to them -- ghastly and unnatural process.)

I'm not a shopper by inclination, and the whole present-buying routine seems tedious. At least it does until I actually get out onto the streets, see the lights, hear the crowds, and abandon my natural Scrooge-like tendencies.

A far cry from my childhood, when kids seemed more numerous, adults seemed less visible, and gifts were fantastic blessings from heaven. Christmas, then, was the most spectacular day of the year. In those days, our ceiling-high Christmas tree was engulfed by stacks of presents -- the stacks made more amazing by our own diminutive size. Christmas was, simply, magic. Magic not only because of the beauty of the tree, the wrapped presents, the carols being sung, the entire family's excitement, the presence of relatives we saw only occasionally -- but, most of all, because of the anticipated loot.

Every Christmas was joyously exciting, at least until college. But my best Christmas ever, without a question, was the year I was 10. That was my Lionel train year. I'm not sure where I got the idea that I wanted an electric train; I probably had seen train displays in department stores or toy stores, and had been transfixed.

To a kid, life feels like a world designed exclusively for adults. In pre-computer days, there were few ways by which a ten-year-old boy could exert control over his environment. A train set, with an array of levers and push-buttons -- the more, the better -- at his disposal, each causing some instant, unquestioning and gratifying response from the train layout, gave him that longed-for illusion of personal power.

For months before Christmas, I'd pored over the Lionel catalog. I could tell you the composition of every Lionel train set offered for sale. I knew the strengths and weaknesses of each locomotive, both steam and diesel. I knew the capabilities (and prices) of all the accessories ("As your powerful freight comes highballing down the pike, watch as our grade crossing guard comes running out of his shack, waving his red lantern to warn automobile traffic!" -- yes, yes!)

It had to be Lionel, of course. A younger kid in the neighborhood owned -- well, I suspect his dad actually owned -- an American Flyer train. American Flyers bragged that they were more realistic, because they used two-rail rather than three-rail track. Big deal. No serious kid would want a train set where the locomotives themselves had no whistles, sets sold by a train company that tried to make up for this lack by also selling clunky, phony looking billboards from which a whistle could be coaxed. And did American Flyer have electromagnetic knuckle couplers, couplers that looked exactly like real couplers on real rolling stock? Hahahaha, are you serious? Have you ever seen how American Flyer couples its cars together? What a pathetic joke!

This is the time of year when you've been watching re-runs of the movie about the kid who begs his folks for months for a "Red Ryder carbine-action, two hundred shot Range Model air rifle," right? Well, that was me, during the months before my tenth Christmas. But my "holy grail" was a gift for a budding intellectual with an engineering mind, not something that would "put your eye out"!

Christmas Eve, when my family opened presents, finally arrived, and had gone well. I'd made a good haul. I'd actually pushed thoughts of the electric train -- which hadn't appeared under the tree -- to the back of my mind. Having my own Lionel train had been too much of a delirious fantasy for me to really and truly expect to receive it. I was playing with one of my gifts when my dad said -- just like in the movies -- oh, wait, here's one more present for Donny! Somehow, a cardboard box -- unwrapped, oddly enough for a family that took extravagant care to wrap everything -- appeared out of nowhere. I was confused. I pried open the top, like an explorer opening a treasure chest -- and then I saw it. The cardboard box contained a large number of smaller boxes. Each box was colored orange and blue, a combination that (until Boise State) meant only one thing -- Lionel.

When I recall that evening, I re-experience vividly the golden, dream-like aura that seemed to surround its events. It was one of Lionel's smallest train sets -- a steam locomotive, a coal car, a gondola, an oil tanker and a caboose. It had just 8 sections of O-27 gauge curved track, 3 sections of straight track, and an electromagnetic straight track used for uncoupling cars. The only layout that could be built, without further, future investments in track, was a simple oval. No matter. I was in heaven, and unbelieving that my parents had actually figured out what I really wanted, amazed despite my nearly daily conversations with them about the wonders of train ownership.

My dad and a couple of uncles, being grown-up boys themselves to varying degrees, were also interested in this technological marvel. I was told finally to head off to bed, so that Santa could make his visit and fill our stockings for the morning. I couldn't bear to leave my train in the hands of grown-ups who lacked my own expertise in railroading, and who were showing an unhealthy interest it.

Like Ralphie with his new BB gun, I actually tried to take the electric tranformer to bed with me, to protect my exclusive ownership in my train. Or maybe just to sleep close to it.

So far as I can tell, no one within my family today has such urgent desires. Nothing I could buy for anyone could conceivably create so much happiness. But I suppose I'd better tramp around downtown tonight, and at least make some sort of effort.