Copyright 1997 Tom Fowler

Fowler Family Christmas

Excerpted from I Was a Kid When I Was a Kid

Christmas should be a magical, mystical time for young children, and so it was for me. The happiest times of a happy childhood were spent during the Christmas seasons of the 1950's and early '60's. Today, Christmas means even more to me than it did then, but for different and more mature reasons. I spoke of unexpected gifts from our Lord in the last chapter, and I truly believe that the spirit of Christmas is the Lord's gift to small children.

I didn't view it this way then, of course, but now I can see that during the holiday season we kids enjoyed a month full of joyful anticipation. It began with the long Thanksgiving weekend, and just about the time we finished eating turkey and pie, thoughts quickly turned to Santa Claus and Christmas.

The shopping malls that are so predominant today did not exist in the 1950's, (the Penn Square Mall, the first of its kind in Oklahoma City, opened in 1960), so the season officially began in my mind when Dad would drive the family downtown to do Christmas shopping, usually the first or second Saturday after Thanksgiving. Santa Claus was waiting to see kids like me in the basement of the Brown's Department Store and the several mile ride from our home to downtown would induce an almost trance like state in my mind, one which would not ebb until I had seen what Santa had left for Corky and I Christmas morning.

I remember the Christmas decorations hung up over the streets downtown, and the hustle and bustle of people with arms full of packages, trying to get by one another on the narrow city sidewalks. Today, in the well lit, spacious, and impersonal shopping malls, it is not the same.

Usually, depending on what day Christmas fell on that year, school children would get close to two weeks off from school for Christmas and New Year's. The days leading up to the BIG DAY were both joyful and miserable for a young boy, as one had all day, everyday, to look longingly at presents under the tree and wonder if Santa would bring what he had been asked to bring.

One year, Corky's sense of humor got the better of me, (that happened often when I was a kid). Several days before Christmas, he handed me a wrapped gift and told me that it was his Christmas present to me. Immediately, I took the package and shook it, testing for such things as weight and sound. A light, soundless gift meant it was something grown-up like clothes, and Corky was reaching the age where he couldn't be trusted to give a kid a kid's gift. So, I was relieved when I found that it rattled when I shook it. It was light of weight, but since it made noise I did not worry about it being something boring like socks or handkerchiefs, (a favorite gift of Grandmom Fowler).

Corky's gift intrigued me. I was fairly expert in the weights and sounds of toys versus clothes, but his gift sounded and felt like neither. It was too noisy to be a toy and too light even for socks, although it was wrapped in a box perfectly suited to house a clip-on tie, a thought so horrendous that I blocked it from my mind.

Corky's gift was the first present I opened that Christmas and, to this day, I chuckle at his simple but very effective joke. Inside the gift box there were no toys, clip-on ties, socks or handkerchiefs. There was a dollar bill, (a nice gift from a brother in the late 1950's) and two pennies that slid the length of the box every time I shook it.

I'll bet I'm the only person who ever received the exact sum of $1.02 from an older brother at Christmas.

But, although sitting on Santa's lap, spending atmospheric Saturdays downtown, and wondering about gifts under the tree are all cherished memories now, the big event leading up to Christmas was spending Christmas Eve at our grandparent’s house.

Granddad and Grandmom, (as we called them), Fowler always invited their children and families to come over and spend Christmas Eve at their house, where we would exchange gifts and open them after dinner. If my arithmetic does not fail me, there would be anywhere from 10-15 of us there on Christmas Eve, depending on whether Uncle Jack and his family could make it in from out of town. Dinner was cooked by Grandmom during the first years of my recollection, but later we began a Christmas Eve tradition of eating out. For several years, we dined at the old Bishop's Restaurant downtown, but later switched to ValGenes Cafeteria when Bishop's closed its doors.

The real fun for the kids came after dinner when it was time to open gifts. Either I or one of the younger cousins got the honor of passing them out and within the space of a few short minutes the living room floor would be covered in wrapping paper.

As I mentioned before, some of the gifts were traditional and predictable. Granddad was a Hanes clothing wholesaler and you could go to the bank on the fact that his and Grandmoms's gift would be something with a Hanes label on it, usually underwear or T-shirts. (Cousin Mike and I groaned about this every year, as we were close in age and temperament, but there was nothing we could do about it. We both knew that grown up decisions were binding and final). Granddad always received boxes of cigars from his sons, and he and I used to joke that, again this year, he expected several pairs of red socks. (As far as I know, Granddad never owned a pair of red socks. At least, I never saw him wear anything other than black. However, this is not the point. I felt very grownup back in those days to share a private joke with so eminent a man as my granddad).

But, usually the aunts and uncles would come through with something kids liked, and Christmas Eve always turned out to be a wonderful evening spent in great anticipation of what Santa would leave the next day.

The camaraderie I felt with my cousins on this night was one of great teamwork. Corky had the misfortune of being older than the rest of us and I don't think he felt like one of the kids, but I and the cousins (three boys, two girls), learned that, if we listened close to what the grownups talked about, often we could get an excellent idea of what Santa was to bring the next morning. (Was Santa working with the parents? That thought scares me to this day). One year, Jackie, another of my cousins, whispered to me, "I heard you're going to get a TV set for your room tomorrow."

Sure enough, she was right. I did get the TV I wanted.

Those childhood Christmas Eve's were, I believe, as perfect a time as a human being can expect to have in this earthly existence. It always seemed to the kids that Bishop's took too long to serve the food when we ate there, but I imagine that was more impatience on our part than it was inefficiency by them. Also, I always thought that it took the grownups too long to get settled after returning to the house. In my mind, the opening of gifts had been delayed too long as it was.

So I'll say this: The mood, the spirit of Christmas, the closeness I felt with all of the Fowler family on those long ago nights is something that has never been duplicated or repeated, although I have been fortunate to have experienced many happy times since then. A Fowler Family Christmas, or, more accurately, A Fowler Family Christmas Eve, was indeed lightning in a bottle for me.

Granddad died in 1981, 11 years after the death of Grandmom, and it was the end of that generation in both sides of our family. Mom's parents were deceased, so when Granddad passed on, I felt it harder than I did for the others. It was the end of an era. But the Lord gives and the Lord takes away, and I came away from his death with something I will treasure always.

Every year, Grandmom put up a very small, very modest artificial Christmas tree. Not a woman with a great deal of imagination, Grandmom decorated that tree the exact same way every year. Today, I am glad she did so, as it helps me remember it better. It was a small tree which she always placed on a table and there were a limited number of ornaments on it. One of the ornaments was an old glassine figure of a house, which Granddad said was 100 years old. It was a small thing which hung lightly on the fragile limbs of Grandmom's tree, but I loved it and would study it closely every Christmas season.

When Granddad died, I was allowed to take possession of it.

I take it out of the box I keep it in every now and then, just to look at it and remember Christmas with loved ones now gone and loved ones scattered far and wide. The magic of a childhood Christmas is contained in that one obscure ornament and I wouldn't trade it for several gold bars.

Don't offer to buy it from me. You don't have enough money.

END