My Greatest Christmas Gift

Girls

I may have told you this story before but I'm going to repeat it, as it is fresh in my mind. Mainly because as I write this, it is Christmas Eve 2021 and I'm watching Christmas Story on TV for maybe the 100th time...maybe 200th...but I so enjoy watching it. 

So many events that happen in the movie remind me of my days as a little boy in Owensville. Just like in the movie, we too had a coal furnace at our house. I can still see dad going down the stairs to shovel coal in this humongous monster of a furnace with arms reaching up through the floor (the heating ducts leading up to the rooms in the house). There is a smell from that burning coal that I can still imagine smelling to this day. 

We also had an old car like so many of them that they show in the movie. Also like the movie, the downtown of Owensville was the active part of town, even though it was much smaller. The hardware store where dad worked was right on the square and was a busy place. Even the old school building in the movie looked just like the school that we walked to from our house about 6 blocks away.

And just like the movie, when I was 6 or 7 years old, I got the present that I still remember as one of my favorite presents to this day. It too was a rifle. Different from Ralphi's B-B gun, my gun only used caps that I could load in the gun and when I fired it, it gave the sound of a bullet firing. In those days in the early 1960s, there was a cowboy show on TV called The Rifleman that we watched when it was on. It was based in the 1800's and was about a single parent farmer raising his young son out on the prairie. The dad had a rifle that he'd rigged up with a special handle that made it a rapid-fire rifle. The gun that dad got me that Christmas was a replica of that rifle and from that day I was the king of the cowboys in the neighborhood. Even before I got that rifle, I wore a cowboy hat all the time and our neighbors, the Presnell's, always called me 'Cowboy'. I'm guessing that new rifle only reinforced my nickname in those days.

Like Ralphie says at the end of Christmas Story...that gun was one of the greatest Christmas gifts I had ever received or would ever receive.  

I hope you have Christmas stories in your memories that remind you of happy times.

Be talkin' to ya.

Dad