By KEVIN NEVERS
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED DEC. 24, 2002, IN THE CHESTERTON TRIBUNE
My favorite scene in just about my favorite Yule movie, “A Christmas Story,” is the one set in Goldblatt’s department in downtown Hohman, Ind., the Depression-era alter ego of Hammond.
C-Day is rapidly approaching, Ralphie has pinned his hopes for happiness on a single
desperately desired present, and—though a scoffer at heart—he decides to hedge his bets with an official appeal to the store Santa.
The scene is as horrifying as it is funny. Santa is a wino, his elves are thugs, and Ralphie finds himself booted down a vertiginously long slide after Santa tells him to forget his fondest Christmas wish: An official Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot Range model air rifle.
“You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.
“Merry Christmas.
“Ho.
“Ho.
“Ho.”
Now I’ve always found Santa—porcine, hirsute, and reeking of reindeer—as nightmarish as any circus clown, and as a boy I would’ve sooner skipped Christmas altogether than sit in the lap of a hot-breathed old coot who prefers the company of children. Yet, ghastly though Santa is, for a chance to wander through the magic kingdom of Goldblatt’s, even I might have been induced to take a seat.
Because, in its sheer holiday excess, the department store itself steals the scene. Greeters dressed as characters from “The Wizard of Oz” flit through the aisles. Mechanical woodsmen chop tin logs and keep rough beat with the axes to the tinny carols buzzing from loudspeakers. Gilt and silver foil catches the glint of candy-colored lights, forests of greenery deck the walls, icicles hang shimmering from pillars. And, dressed in their Sunday best, families make a night of it as they would at the fair.
Like Ralphie, I too once upon a time was drawn irresistibly to the one-stop something-for-everyone dream factory that was—and has long since ceased to be—the department store at Christmas time, the child’s Araby, Xanadu, and Byzantium all rolled into one.
Unlike Ralphie, on the other hand, I rarely had so specific a Christmas wish as an official Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot Range model air rifle. Mattel, Hasbro, Lionel, Corgi, Milton Bradley, Marx, Revell, Tonka: The department store teemed with toys, each one bigger, louder, faster than the last, and a wrong choice, made in the heat of the moment, would—the thought terrified me—ruin my life. I spend hours, beginning in September, paging through the J.C. Penney catalogue, lying awake at night replaying TV commercials in my head.
And then the day would arrive at last when, my father badgered into submission, he and I would undertake that most sacred and dilatory of childhood quests and, my hand in his, proceed into the catacombs of the department store in solemn search of The Perfect Gift: Spring-loaded, red-lacquered, self-propelled, double-barreled, electric, pneumatic, robotic, supersonic, with 67 moving parts, a dangerously incendiary heating element, dual-speed rotors, blinking lights, and heavy as hell. It was there, somewhere, I would know it when I saw it, and when I saw it I would tell my father, and he would say “We’ll see.”
Alas. The Perfect Gift, like the Philosopher’s Stone, forever eluded me. It was always in the next aisle over, high on a shelf just out of sight, sold out only minutes before. Paralyzed by possibility, I could no more choose this gizmo over that gadget than I could have chosen my right eye over my left.
But my old man, O my old man, he was a genius. With a father’s uncanny ability to see into his son’s soul and a husband’s uncannier ability to persuade his wife that a rocket launcher is almost certainly safer than it looks, he always knew what I wanted even if I didn’t, and like an answer to an unprayed prayer The Perfect Gift was always waiting for me under the tree.
One year it was die-cast model of the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car with wings that shot out of the sides like a switchblade with the press of a button. Another year, a remote-controlled tank that fired missiles across the room with entertaining inaccuracy. Christmas after Christmas my father achieved perfection: A castle with a draw bridge and a trap door and knights in armor with battering rams and catapults, whole divisions of plastic soldiers in olive drab and feldgrau, a chemistry set, an Erector set, and, yes, in one glorious year a BB gun. They’re all still up in my parents’ attic, dusty, broken probably, but perfect.
And so.
The glory days of the D battery are long gone. We’ve passed from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, and toys, real toys, have gone the way of dodge ball and wooden baseball bats. Now they’re digital and virtual, wan thin things designed by upstart technicians who’ve never in their lives known the joy of playing with a G.I. Joe or the sadness of throwing him away when he busts an arm. They’re hardly worth the shopping for anymore, which is just as well because the shopping is drudgery. Department stores come in pairs today, tacked like afterthoughts to the
ends of suburban wind tunnels called malls which sell everything but a good time.
Christmas shopping is what you make of it, though, and in the green and red days of December I find myself returning again and again to the mall, still in search of The Perfect Gift. It was never a toy. It’s a memory, carried in the heart and unwrapped years later. The fugitive grasp of my father’s hand. A faint echo of his whispered promise. A moment, felt more than recalled, of anticipation and surprise and bliss. And sometimes from the corner of my eye I can just see, reflected in a store’s window, a boy, clamoring, demanding, yet utterly loved by the man who stands patiently at his side.
Merry Christmas, Pa.
