My Life and Times. part 4: Childhood Christmases

We had a strange setup in the house where I grew up. It was on the second floor of a two-story house, and consisted of four rooms in a row (kitchen–dining room–living room–sunporch) with three bedrooms alongside those rooms. But we had 7 people living together during the latter half of the 1950s, when I was still single digits in age. So my parents slept in one bedroom; my 2 younger brothers slept in the other; my grandfather slept in the third. My grandmother could not lay down in a bed for various health reasons, so she slept in a chair in the living room.

That left me without a bedroom, so I slept in the sun porch. Which meant that I had to learn to go to sleep with the noise of several people watching television about 10 feet away. Is it any wonder that I am now able to fall asleep under any circumstances, no matter how noisy it is?

Every Christmas, the only place where my parents could put a Christmas tree was in the sun porch, right beside my bed! So I recall awaking in the middle of the night nearly every year and seeing piles of toys in the dark right next to my bed. I was always a “good boy,” so I never got out of my bed, but I would lie there in the dark peering under the tree, trying to figure out (1) what the heck those toys were, and (2) were any of them actually for me?

One year the gift I wanted most of all was a robot; in fact, it was called Robby the Robot, a replica of the robot in the sf movie Forbidden Planet. Lying in bed the night of Christmas Eve, I was almost positive that scary-looking thing peering at me in the dark was not some kind of hideous monster, but my robot! Needless to say, I could not sleep that night at all awaiting my chance to play with Robby the next morning.

Christmas morning I was thrilled to see that it was indeed Robby the Robot under the tree. But my brother Stephen and my cousin Rita (who lived downstairs, and was more like a sister than a cousin) wanted to play with it too. Being the passive kid that I was, I let them have first chance at it. So what happened? The damned thing broke. No more talking; no more walking, before I even got to play with it once!

Now nobody gets first dibs at my toys before I do, lol.