What is the best Christmas gift you ever received? Mine all seem to deal with the outdoors, from fishing and hunting supplies to camping gear. Getting up on Christmas morning and discovering what Santa had left me was always thrilling. And there were always presents from my parents, too.
When I was 15 my parents gave me and my brother Mitchell 300 spinning reels and matching Abu Garcia rods. I used my outfit for many years, catching anything that swam in ponds and lakes around my house, including bream, catfish, bass and crappie. I still have that old Mitchell in my garage. Long past its usable days, I keep it to remind me of those great times.
There was always a variety of hooks, sinkers and corks in my stocking, and they were real corks, the kind you had to split with a knife so you could put it on your line. Fortunately I got a knife pretty much every Christmas, too. I used my pocket knifes for everything from splitting corks to cleaning squirrels, and we played games like mumbly peg with them, too.
After Crème came out with “rubber” worms I got a pack of every color they made. Red or black worms were your choices back then. And there was usually a Hula Popper, Snagless Sally or Creek Chub lure to cast for bass. I wore them all out.
I got a BB gun when I was six after having my tonsils taken out and every Christmas after that for several years I got several tubes of BBs under the tree. When I graduated to a .22 rifle and a .410 shotgun I always got a brick of .22 bullets and some shells.
Those ten boxes of 50 bullets in a carton meant many hours of shooting squirrels, birds and targets. But they didn’t last all year so I had to go up to Mr. John Harry’s store fairly often and buy them one box at a time, for 50 cents! And I got a couple of boxes of .410 shells to shoot rabbits and shoot at birds. I could always hit rabbits much better than doves and quail with that single shot gun.
Clothes were always under the tree but I didn’t pay much attention to the school clothes. But my eyes lit up when I got a camo jacket, a set of Duckback briar proof pants and coat or boot sox. I knew I would be doing things I loved when wearing then, as opposed to when the school clothes were worn.
Things were more simple back then. There were lots of fun things from cap pistols and rolls of caps to boxes of sparklers. And fruit was included in the stockings. Bananas, apples and oranges as well as pecans were always there. Strangely enough, the oranges looked exactly like the naval oranges in the big bag we had brought back from our annul Christmas visit to my grandmother in Ocala, Florida. And the pecans looked just like the ones we had been picking up in the yard that fall.
Each year there was one big gift, too. One year I got a shooting range thing that had ducks that revolved on a pole and I shot at them with a gun and rubber stopper bullets. And I will never forget the bicycle I got one Christmas. It still makes my heart ache when I think about it.
Daddy was the Ag teacher at the local school. One afternoon just before the holidays I went out to the shop. There were two bicycles hanging there. Daddy had bought two old bikes, repaired them, sanded them and painted them. I knew immediately they were for me and my brother for Christmas.
When I got my bicycle I was disappointed it was not a new one and I was a little embarrassed about it. But I rode that bicycle everywhere, going squirrel hunting with my .22 on the handlebars or fishing with my tackle box in the basket and my rod and reel across the handlebars.
It was few year later, when I was a little older and wiser, that it hit me that daddy could not afford a new bicycle for me and my brother. So he found something he could afford and worked many hours to make them look brand new. I realized how much love and care went into those bicycles and I am ashamed of my self, even after over 50 years, of how I felt when I first got it.
Decorating the house was always fun, too. And we used home-made ornaments mostly, from stars made with left over foil to toothpicks stuck into sweet gum balls and painted. There was the annual trip to the old house site overgrown with what mama called Smilax, what I know now as green briar. It stayed green all winter and we outlined the door with it and put a red home-made bow on the door.
My job was to find the tree, so all fall when hunting rabbits and quail I watched for the perfect cedar growing in old abandoned fields. There were always hundreds of them and it took a lot of effort to find the perfect one. When I did we would go to it the week before CHristms in our old truck and cut it down. I still love the smell of cedar in the house this time of year.
I think Christmas has changed too much in my lifetime. I hope you will still share some of the old ways this year.