A Visit from Old Saint Nick We all need a little Christmas, right this very minute
I
t’s been a tough year. In many ways, which I will not remind us all of, it’s been a really difficult year. However, it’s the Christmas season and even if you are not a Christian celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, my wish for you is that you may enjoy this end-of-the-year season when hopefully we can all experience a little bit of the spirit of “peace on earth and good will toward all.” If I may for a few moments, I would like to take you back to a time when things were, at least for me, so much more simpler. When I was a youngster, we looked forward to Christmas with great enthusiasm. I’d get a break from school, there would be cousins and other family to visit with, and, of course, there would be the gifts under the tree. Dad actually got the day off, and because he was my best friend, that was very, very cool. The tree in our house always had bubble lights and tinsel, and my Lionel trains ran underneath. We weren’t rich, but my Dad always made sure we had nice gifts. For me, one of those gifts always included something new for the train layout. There was a late November ritual, you would always get a new Lionel catalog from the hardware store and then you would dream. I think my Dad somehow listened to those dreams very carefully as it seemed he always knew what it was I dreamt most of. How could he possibly know that the Tie Jector Car and the Bosco car were at the top of the list? But he did.
"Yup, that's your author and his best friend in the world at Christmas with Lionel Trains under the tree."
We weren’t rich, but we were happy. I know now how lucky I was to be brought up in that kind of world. To make that world even better, we lived upstairs from Uncle Herman, because that’s what you did in those days, you sort of kept things in the family. In a previous article, I mentioned my Uncle Herman, who lived downstairs with Aunt Elsa. He was really a great uncle by blood, and we spent many days together in my youth. Uncle Herman was, in fact, a true sailor from Germany, and one of my heroes. He started his long sailing career as a cabin boy to the captain on an early sailing vessel. That deal was struck, I was
later told, because his family could not afford to keep him at an early age. Many years later, when the ship was in port in New York City, Uncle Herman, now a veteran sailor, decided it was time to go ashore and start that part of our family tree here in New Jersey. Tales of going around the Horn and of far away exotic ports were among the wonderful stories Uncle Herman would explain in great detail to me, and I thought they were great adventures. And so now, to tie this all together, let me explain that it was at the Christmas season that first I heard the name and learned about Sinterklaas from my Uncle Herman. December 2020
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