HoHoHo. 12/22/23

The holidays are upon us. The time for buying gifts in impossibly overcrowded stores, putting said gifts together, admiring the gifts you receive and the gifts others have received, and if the recipient of one of your gifts is young enough, playing the gift with them. Now Al (like John) is a model train enthusiast. And he loves playing with his grandson Billy. For me, playing with an already set up train system is lots of fun. Setting it up and then putting it away…not so much. Let’s face it, you’re either a collector or a chuck-it-outer. Collector types love stamps, coins, past issues of cooking magazines they save “just in case” they want to make that recipe that seemed so delectable. Now where was it again? Or what was it again? And which month? Which year? I had a friend who was a collector. He had a model train set with so many pieces, he could have set up a track big enough to fill a convention hall. Okay, I’m exaggerating. A little. Me? Those zillions of baseball cards jammed into shoe boxes, those hundreds of LP’s warping in cardboard wine boxes in our old basement, they could have been worth…nothing. Because I didn’t keep them in “mint condition.” I just kept them. But back to Billy and Al, they bond over trains and will continue to do so, as soon as Billy removes the damn candy wrapper from the tunnel.

And onto Santa Marv. At what age do you stop believing in Santa? For me it was easy. I’m Jewish so we never believed in him in the first place. But it took my kids until around 7 to stop believing in the Tooth Fairy. Listen. Kids are smart. And they know how to get what they want. They’ll drop a hint (or a couple thousand hints) about what they’d like and then put up with almost anything to get them. When you compare sitting on a complete stranger’s lap in a department store with sitting on Grandpa Marv’s lap at home, the choice is easy. The kids (or grandkids) will put up with aunts and uncles telling them how cute they are while pinching their cheeks, to the constant exclamations of “my, how you’ve grown,” as long as they can get their hands on a Malibu Barbie or, for that matter, a model train set. All aboard!

Have a great Christmas and/or Holiday season,

Andy and John