It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,
Everywhere you go,
Take a look in the five-and-ten, glistening once again,
With candy canes and silver lanes aglow.

– Robert Meredith Willson

My favorite “five and ten” was Woolworth’s. It, like so many familiar places Downriver, used to transform at this time of year into a Christmas wonderland. Cotton snow trimmed the display cases, sometimes accented with sparkly silver dust that clung to our wool mittens much better than it did to the cotton snow. Woolworth’s was where Mom and Dad bought our Christmas staples – spare colored bulbs, replacement bubble lights, and pounds and pounds of lead tinsel to hang on our Christmas tree. It’s amazing that our generation ever amounted to anything, considering the amount of lead we must have absorbed through our fingertips each Yuletide season.

While the transformation of Woolworth’s was dramatic; it was the transformation of the most unlikely places that I remember – and miss – the most.

The National Supermarket was, most of the year, my least favorite destination. After Thanksgiving, however, my pals and I begged to go along with our parents on grocery shopping trips. We wandered along the dairy and frozen food cases, with our necks stretched and contorted as we stared upward in awe at the array of toys by long-gone American toymakers like Deluxe, Topper and Ideal displayed high above us on the supermarket top shelves. Jimmy Jets, Playmobiles, Battlewagons and Secret Sam Spy Cases topped our Christmas lists.

Even Clay’s Sinclair Station reflected a little North Pole décor with its evergreen rope hung in the windows and wound around the sign pole out front, accented by red bows and berries. And, in addition to S&H Green Stamps, Dad used to get a free Christmas ornament with every fill-up between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. I remember driving home, cradling one of those little glass treasures in my palms and thinking such a beautiful piece of artistry must have come directly from Santa’s workshop.

Woolworth’s is a retail history footnote, the only toys in supermarkets now are related to gourmet cooking, and “Holiday Countdown” instant lottery tickets are the most festive item we’ll find at our local gas stations.

A lot has changed about Christmastime Downriver since those magical seasons of our childhoods. But some things – the really important ones – maybe not so much as it seems.

My family and I will be bringing down Christmas decorations from the attic soon, and I know that at the very bottom of a boxed marked “ornaments,” wrapped in tissue paper and an old yellowed sheet of newspaper, is a small, faded glass ornament that I held in my hands on a drive home from Clay’s more than 50 years ago. It long ago lost all its sparkles and its shine, but when I hang it on my tree, it’ll be looking a lot like Christmas – in my home and in my heart.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Fill ‘er Up – with Memories

I stopped at a local gas station last Saturday morning with my two daughters – the oldest driving, thanks to her newly-issued permit. She slipped from behind the wheel and headed into the gas station/convenience store with her sister – the same one we’ve been going to since they were both in car seats – in search of their usual gas station fare; a bottle of pop, a snack, and maybe a pack of gum for later.

As I watched them go in, and began pumping gas, my memories carried me up the road several miles and back in time several decades – to Clay’s Sinclair Station.

Clay ran the place with his “boys,” and it was a regular stop for my dad and me at least a couple of times a week. I don’t remember Clay’s last name. Don’t know that I ever knew it, really – same for the names of his “boys.” There were two of them, and teamed with their dad, they were like a pit crew to every neighborhood car that stopped to gas-up. That’s what dad always called it. We never “stopped for gas,” or “went to get gas,” we always stopped to “gas-up.”

Before the engine of dad’s ’55 Chevy sputtered to a full stop, one of the boys always had the hood up to check the oil and water; and the other set the pump and washed the windshield. Clay’s job was, my dad always said, to “… chew the fat with the paying customers.” In the few minutes it took the boys to tend to the Chevy, he and dad caught up with all the local sports, shared stories about working for a living, and managed a couple of comments each about “the old ball-and-chain.”

Clay’s wasn’t a place to get snacks or gum; although there was an old Coke machine out front that dispensed those little 7 ounce bottles of pop for a nickel – but only part of the year, because in the winter it was unplugged and emptied, so the pop wouldn’t freeze. And, now that I think about it, you could get gum – but it was from a penny gumball machine put there by the local Rotary Club.

Clay’s was the place you went for gas, oil, and “good used tires,” and “reliable batteries” – as the sign in the window promised. And there were some bonuses, too – S&H Green Stamps and, once in a while, “special edition drinking glasses” – one free with each fill-up of 10 gallons or more.

I was snapped back to the present by the “thunk” of the gas pump stopping and by the voices of my daughters – they brought me a Diet Mountain Dew – urging me to hurry up, so we could get going to where ever it was that was so urgent for them to get that morning.

I hung the nozzle back on the pump, screwed on the gas cap, took the receipt from the slot, and made my way around my car – to the passenger door – as my daughter started the engine.

While it sometimes seems that things have changed so much, it’s really not the case, you know? Clay’s Sinclair Station, and everything about it, may be just a memory from my childhood; but I realized that I was doing exactly what my dad and I did on all those Saturday mornings Downriver for so many years – making little everyday memories that will last a lifetime.