A couple of photos in this week’s Optic provide proof that Christmas comes but once a year, for little ones and loved ones dear. Even if it comes late.
    My first glance at the Christmas gift-tendering photos convinced me that the photographer, Don Pace, had forgotten to develop the photos in a timely matter. But “develop” dates me, way back to the middle 1950s, when I used to “soup” black-and-white film in the Optic darkroom.     Trying to meet a photo deadline depended on how long it took to dry the 4×5-inch negative, print it, dry the print and place it on a used-to-be-high-tech Scan-a-Graver machine. But that was the easy part: an array of toxic chemicals, which would have done justice to Frankenstein’s workshop, played a part in emulsifying the images.
    The Christmas gifts, presented by Los Hermanos motorcycle club, were actually delivered weeks after Santa promised, for reasons explained in the Optic cutlines. The photo images, captured by Don Pace’s digital camera, took only a few minutes to get transferred to the computer.
    This time, Christmas — literally — spanned the customary 12 days, and then some. The children featured in the photos received a truck and a doll, respectively. Modest enough.
    But a quick look at the annual “Letters to Santa Claus” feature reveals that the most-requested items were X-Box 360s, PlayStation3, laptop computers, I-Pods and do-everything cell phones. Some supplicants requested all of the above.
    Children in 1981, 25 years ago, had desires too, albeit simpler. A scan of the letters to Santa from that year shows five specific things kids wanted: Rubik’s cubes (which everyone insisted on spelling “rubex”); Barbie Dolls, which, if by keeping the same proportions became life-size, would result in a nine-foot-tall babe; a Stretch Monster; an AM-FM radio; and a Simon game.
    For those of us younger than 25: a Rubik’s Cube is a block with 27 linked colored cubes, the goal of which is to arrange them so all the colors on each side match; a Stretch Monster was a syrup-filled rubber doll that would allow boys to elongate its limbs without breaking or tearing them; this toy had the magical power of forcing every under-10 boy named Diego to try to discover “what will happen if Dad’s car runs over Stretch Monster.”
    The Simon game, which operated on four batteries the size of rolling pins, let out a tone as it flashed a colored light. The object was to keep up with the ever-accelerating flashing lights by tapping the colors in sequence.
    And kids 25 or so years older than the 1981 crop had desires too, but in 1950 we were all too happy enjoying the beneficence of nature to worry about gifts. The snow, which used to come down much more than it did last week — and never caused a school cancellation — was as great as summer vacation.
    Even in economically depressed Immaculate Conception School, things were stratified. Kids were divided into three categories: those who owned galoshes, those who wished they owned galoshes, and those who’d never heard of galoshes.
    Snows came early in those years, giving the “haves” an opportunity to don their overshoes, which I later learned were the same as galoshes.
    My introduction to the rubberized shoe coverings came when Jane and Barbara frantically sought the attention of our teacher, Sister Mary Esperanza Contenta. In a well-rehearsed fit of hysteria, Jane told Sister that Barbarawas having a difficulty removing for galoshes from her street shoes. “I keep pulling on them, but I can’t get them apart,” one of them said.
    Even as a naive fourth-grader, I realized the game they were playing: anything to call attention to the fact that they at least had galoshes.
    That was kind of like complaining they’d lost the keys to their Rolls-Royce.
    Those of us with ordinary shoes simply toughed it out, although one of my classmates used to tape Cellophane bags to his shoes. It worked.
    The Jane-and-Barbara performance is like a scene in Steinbeck’s “Tortilla Flats,” in which one of the residents of a hovel that lacked electricity suddenly inherited a vacuum cleaner. Knowing it wouldn’t work without juice, she provided her own sound effects, making motor-like noises with her voice, to simulate an Oreck-type deep-cleaning. Anything to show the neighbors she owned a vacuum cleaner.
    Not wanting to appear ostentatious, I refused to buy a pair of galoshes, even when I was out of school, on my own, and able to afford a pair. Real men don’t need extra foot coverings.
    In the Midwest, where I worked for a few years, however, I learned the meaning of snow and wet cold. Whereas in the Southwest we’re accustomed to sunshine that immediately follows snow, we went for 16 days in suburban Chicago without seeing the sun and with temperatures of 16 degrees.
    It was a wet cold I felt on my way to my very first date in that town.
    Walking from the car to Carol’s front door, I tromped through a foot of snow that thoroughly soaked both feet. When Carol met me at the door, obviously she expressed concern and asked, “Did you forget your rubbers?”
    W-a-i-t a second. Was she being unnecessarily forward? Is that a proper question to ask a man on the very first date, a date to attend Midnight Mass, no less? Well, I’d just never heard overshoes or galoshes called “rubbers.”
    Carol set me straight in a hurry. And after a few more Illinois snowfalls, I invested in a pair of overshoes, and at work I enjoyed feigning a struggle to remove them, as a way of showing off my store-boughten galoshes to my co-workers and thinking, “Jane and Barbara, wherever you are, eat your hearts out.”

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