I remember waking up one Christmas morning before the roosters and sprinting down the stairs at mom and dad’s house. I may have actually touched 3 stairs on the way down before making a hard left to the living room.
There it was, what I can only describe as a sea of presents. Santa Claus had not only come to town, but he’d seemingly left all of 02536’s presents under our tree. Every package said “To: Richie” or “To: Danny.” It was awesome.
I shook my little brother awake, and then repeated the Superman jump downstairs with him. He was groggy-headed until he saw the pile, it woke him up instantly. It turns out children don’t need coffee, they just need a visit from the North Pole to wake them up.
Then came the worst part, the wait.
You see we had made an agreement with mom and dad that they would be allowed to sleep until 8:30 AM. We had argued for 7, they wanted 10, we found a middle ground. In hindsight I feel guilty for having made them wake up that early because they probably hadn’t gotten to bed until after 2 AM. But, when you’re 10, taking the well-being of others into account is hardly at the top of your priority list, especially when the big guy in the red suit is on his way to town.
Vegas would not have given odds at whether or not we’d be actually able to wait until 8:30 AM, remember that’s 180-minutes of waiting for two kids that were staring the mother lode in the eye, with permission only to empty our stockings, which were packed full of chocolate coins. We were bouncing off the walls to begin with, throw in a sugar rush and it’s a miracle that we weren’t using our parents’ bed as a trampoline. Only having received several Star Wars figures and GI Joes, with the Kung Fu grip, in our stockings satiated our need to tear through wrapping paper like a Honey Badger through a cobra.
Ironically all I really remember about our haul from that Christmas was the amount of presents. I can’t recall what the “big present” was that year, or whether or not I was actually 9-, 10- or 11-years old. It was one of the formative years that’s for sure.
Seconds after writing that last paragraph my cell phone rang, and wouldn’t you know it, it was my mommy. I told her about this column, and she laughed. She said that the big present was probably “a bike, or a boom box or a stereo…and there were plenty of Star Wars figure, probably the Millennium Falcon.”
Yes, I was and still am a huge Star Wars fan. I’m hoping to get the Blu Rays of the movies for Christmas, and I don’t even have a Blu Ray player yet (maybe that will be under the tree too, or picked up on December 26).
“It’s too bad you don’t still have all of that stuff, it’s probably worth a ton,” Mom said.
Actually I do have one of those old figures at my desk at The Enterprise, an original 1978 Chewbacca action figure. It’s missing the gun and is hardly in pristine condition. According to Ebay it’s worth about $10.
But for me it’s worth a whole lot more. It’s a trip on that Millennium Falcon back to my childhood every time I turn my head to the right while I’m pounding on these keys. Maybe something you get, or give, on Sunday will do the same for someone in 2031. I hope so.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all of our readers. God bless us, every one.
The views and opinions in the Enterprise blogs are those of the author and are not neccessarily shared by Falmouth Publishing.
