SANTA SENDS US A CITY

Not having the gift of total recall like some other Christmas reminiscers I rely on flashes of memory that break through the darkness here and there which I can patch together to make a montage if not a full-length double feature with an intermission in the middle.

I think my earliest recollection of the present-giving side of Christmas is of a visit we had from a neighbor who was wearing a new leather jacket that he’d been given. We all greatly admired it, I know. It might not have cut much ice on Park Avenue, but this was the Bronx, in the Depression, and in 1936 or whenever it was a good leather jacket was a handy thing to have around. It kept out the cold, which was pervasive then, showing no regard for the need to stimulate morale in the face of hard times.

It did save us a little electricity, though, because every apartment had a window box perched outside on a window sill, in which the family groceries were kept cold without using a refrigerator. We had a good big one, which was also safe, since we lived on a ground floor, meaning that no one could get hurt if it came unattached from the sill and dropped off. The boxes higher up on the building were more of a menace and could have easily brained one of the alley singers who patrolled between the buildings singing requests in return for contributions thrown down to them. I never heard of a window box falling, though, and the singers could never have been injured by the weight of the coins wrapped up and tossed to them from the windows.

Under these conditions the presents we kids got tended to run in the direction of foul-weather gear suitable for arctic exploration. (Since those days I’ve never worn a scarf or gloves). Once the need for this equipment was met, though, there was room for more frivolous stuff, like tommy guns for instance. These enabled kids to get in touch with their inner Pretty Boy Floyd or Baby Face Nelson, which was never far below the surface in any of us. Our preferred rod was the one with the drum type magazine which emitted showers of sparks when fired -- on the first day. After that there was still noise but no more sparks. Our gang wars persisted anyway.

While I enjoyed the chewing gum cards which carried the stories of heroes like those above I was also branching out into other boys’ literature. Sea stories, Indian stories, cowboys, West Point, detectives, explorers, bring ‘em on. Andersen’s stories, I bet I could read them again. The family made sure to give me at least one major work each Christmas. One of them, which I still have, was Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. When Hurricane Katrina struck a couple of years ago, I was ready. Mark Twain had been predicting such a disaster back in 1883. He had whole chapters about New Orleans and its levees and its overflows and generally soggy character. He included in his book a fourteen-page account of a survey of the New Orleans flood of 1882, written by an engineer who toured the area in a steamboat, rescuing families from rooftops and cattle from rafts. It all made me Mississippi-conscious at a young age, so that I was ready for Hurricane Katrina when it came. Mark had prepared me -- according to him the topsoil being washed out of the country into the Gulf of Mexico by the river was enough to turn America into a Sahara eventually. I didn’t lie awake nights thinking about this, but I didn’t forget it either. I saw it all come through when all Mark’s scenes from 123 years ago were repeated, this time on TV. Does he know that New Orleans is still there but sinking lower every year? And the Mardi Gras is still going on anyway?

Kids eventually reach an age when they get the urge to give up the role of receiver of Christmas presents with no obligation to reciprocate with presents of their own and we were no exceptions. Our neighborhood, though, wasn’t exactly rich in shopping opportunities where something worthy of being given to one’s parents could be found. The local ‘dry goods’ stores or drugstores didn’t have anything fancy on hand, just pots and pans and packages of clothespins or dishtowels.

This ended when Parkchester opened in 1940. All of a sudden we were in the World of Tomorrow as shown at the World’s Fair. Parkchester was a huge apartment development for 40,000 people built by the Metropolitan Life Co. and planted down on our doorstep. It had lawns and curved drives lined with trees, playgrounds for all ages and on top of all this. shopping such as we had never seen before without taking a long ride to Manhattan .

It wasn’t Fifth Avenue of course, but it was still a big step up for the East Bronx. The showplace was the first Macy’s branch ever built (still going). A few levels below there was a Woolworth’s, a Thom McAn’s, a Fanny Farmer confectionary store, a Hanscom’s bakery, places for women’s clothes, men’s clothes, and children’s clothes, along with banks, a post office, bars, restaurants and a movie theater. The consumer culture had arrived.

Macy’s was the biggest attraction for kids. Everything was up-to-date and a pleasure to look at, but it had one disadvantage -- prices. We could pick out items for ourselves to be brought to the attention of parents, but we’d have to go elsewhere for our own shopping. Rexall’s drug store was the solution. It didn’t confine itself to drugs like the neighborhood pharmacies we knew, but offered a lot of items like packages of after-shave lotions for dads and bath powders for moms in Christmas packages which solved all juvenile shopping needs. A kid could hold his own in the family with valuable presents like these. Kids are still giving them. I know.

Happy Kwanzaa, everyone.