Sadly, "Papa" Ted passed away in October, 2012. We are glad to have known him, and especially glad that he opened for us a window into his childhood Christmases with all of their fascinations. - Paul Race

The Magic Window - from Family Christmas Online^TM

My daughter once read something I said about Christmas not being as precious for families as it used to be and disagreed. She said "I dunno, Dad - I was born in '62 (I knew that) and Christmas was just magical and wonderous for me." And, of course, it was. There is but a very brief window in early childhood for us all - a period of time that lasts from birth until we are cast from the nest and into public school - a time while we still have one foot in Heaven and all about the world is new and good. A time when we are so open. A time when we take things so deeply in that they will form us ever after. So we imprint upon the Christmas of our time, and what that was is what it will be for us always.

The Christmases we've always had were always shaped by Christmases that came before - from the Christmases of parents and near family, always trying to remake the magic for us that they had known... hoping to see again through our new eyes and re-enter - if just in little flashes - the now closed Window. Of course, people don't throw out all the decorations after Christmas every year and buy everything new the following. Whose trunks of trimming treasure were not filled with items that were lost friends found anew each Season? - which elicited the same annual remarks such as "My FAVORITE!!" - and -"This was my grandmother's and her mother gave it to her.... So - much is carried forward year by year and generation to generation.

Had I one magic ticket to traverse Time and relive one decade of the 20th Century, I'd choose the Thirties. I was born in '41 - 6 months before Pearl Harbor. Christmas practices had not yet changed. The Christmases of my Magic Time were very much the Christmases as they were from then, from my mother's time: the '20s and the 30's. The Thirties fascinate me. They call to me to know them...the most complex and paradoxical of times .. the Great Depression and the Duesenbergs - bread lines, Labor Wars and the most fabulous Christmas things that were ever made. The largest and most luxurious electric trains and toys... locomotives so large a small child could not lift one from the track! Hobos!The rise of radio. Art Decco. The Empire State Building and the great zeppelins. The talking movies. Aviation. Whole regions of the country getting electricity and indoor plumbing for the first time. An unquestioned faith in the future of technology at a time when many had an outhouse in the back and the most menial of jobs if a job at all. My Mom and Dad lived those times. I had the Christmases they made. I heard their talk. There were qualities about them that made me want to be where they had been see what they had seen. Qualities you rarely see in postwar people . . . .

I think that that is what collecting is about, especially for those who collect for love and not for sterile speculation. This is most true of the toys and trappings of Christmas. Artifacts. Actual, tangible contact with our Special Time. It is true that we forget nothing. The power that an object unseen in decades can have to transport us in mind and spirit back to a specific period or moment of our lives - to unlock long-closed doors in the mansion of our memory - is the true value that it has. We can hold such an object in our hands and know those times were real, and welcome back whole parts of who we were into who we are ...and let the inner child in each of us out to play again - to live as part of us and help us see again through our own Magic Window .

So, God bless us every one, and AMEN! Reality be damned! This is CHRISTMAS! You will find that those old objects will take you back in time, but never listen to those sad fools who say that you are "living in the past." We are what we are because of our pasts. Would that we could live in our pasts, or at least visit from time to time! But we can bring them forward, to live within us as we face the present and the future. Those pasts taught us everything we know.

Never be ashamed of your nostalgia ...it was, and is, your reverence for the life you had, the path that you have traveled.

"Papa" Ted

If you've been reading our pages, you know that we have more articles planned, and a lot on our plate, so keep checking back. And contact us with any questions or suggestions you have in the meantime.

Paul Race

www.familychristmasonline.com

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