Column: The Ghost of Christmas Past

Dear readers,

Look closely at today’s photograph. Left to right, Trent, Zane, Sandy and me. It is from the very first Team Schwinn Christmas card.

Local mailman, Rock Robertson, delivered it to readers’ homes over 30 years ago.

The bicycle is a Schwinn Wasp. One of my favorites, stolen off my front porch many years ago. (To whoever stole it: I forgive you and hope it is still bringing happiness to someone.) 

All these years later my initial thought about the bicycle theft took on a much different tone.  A quick snap of my WWJD bracelet brought me back into the spirit of the season.

Today, I’ve decided to reminisce about a Christmas long before that photo was taken. As William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.”

The past lives not only in people’s memory, but also in AI data centers using more electricity than all the Christmas lights in Shelbyville.

Since I’ve been writing my column for over 30 years, all my memories live in the AI data centers. To not waste the electricity being used to store them, I’m going to give my No. 2 Ticonderoga pencil a rest, pour me an eggnog, cut a slice of fruitcake and let AI write the remainder of this column.

Warning: Kids, never use AI to write your school assignments, it would be cheating.  I can do it because I’m not turning this in for a grade and Johnny and Jeff are not going to submit this column for a Pulitzer Prize.

A famous philosopher once wrote, “into this world we are thrown.” I was launched, a small and unwitting astronaut, to 1103 Shelby Street in 1955. For the first few orbits around the sun, I remember nothing. My consciousness flickered near the end of the Eisenhower administration, a warm, black-and-white hum, like the Indian test pattern on our black and white TV set.

I don’t recall the exact year of the first Christmas in my memory. It was probably during the Kennedy administration. I remember the vague warmth of it, and a shocking vision.

My memory is not like Truman Capote’s Christmas memory.  His was filled with sweet sultanas, sentiment and ancient aunts baking fruitcakes for strangers.

Mine was pure Ray Bradbury sci-fi. It involved neighbors from the 19th century, but they were not looking back. That night, they showed me the future.

In those days, meeting someone from the 19th century wasn't rare. They were everywhere, lingering like the scent of coal dust and rose water. Living artifacts and storehouses of the past. Some still lived in the past, drawing water from wells, dispatching chickens with a grim practicality, and heating their homes with the black heart of the earth.

History now knows them as the parents of "The Greatest Generation" I thought of them as the Steam-Powered Generation.

My own parents were modern, 20th-century people, yet one foot remained in the previous age. We had conquered indoor plumbing and electricity, but our house was still warmed by a coal furnace.

I understood, therefore, the grave practicality of Santa’s threat: if I were naughty, a lump of coal in my stocking. Santa wouldn’t even have to haul it from the North Pole; he could just fetch it from our coal bin.

Our next-door neighbors, Bessie and Trent Hatton, were pure steam-powered vintage.

Trent worked at the Kennedy Car Liner and Bag Company. He was distinguished looking with white hair. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes and enjoyed fishing and playing cards.

Bessie did not work outside the home, nor did she drive a car, both traits not unusual for 19^th century women. Bessie ruled a domain of spotless perfection. Her home was a museum of order where cut-glass candy dishes filled with little white mints or lemon drops sat upon lace doilies. At Christmas, the mints were replaced with an assortment of hard candies and mixed nuts guarded by a brass nutcracker.

On the wall above the sofa, watching over all, was Gainsborough’s “The Blue Boy” in a gilded frame, a silent, serene aristocrat from another world.

But the first Christmas burnt into my memory … something in the Hatton household was out of place. The very air was different.

I wonder now if they had been visited not by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, but by an emissary from a chrome-plated galaxy. Perhaps a quiet spaceship had landed in their Victory Garden.

I remember stepping into their living room and being struck — blinded — by the beauty of their Christmas tree.

It was not a tree. It was a vision. A proclamation.

It was made of aluminum.

It did not whisper of fragrant pine forests. It shimmered. It was as brilliant and otherworldly as “The Helbing” when struck by the noonday sun.

It was atomic. It was the Space Age, crystallized in gleaming, silver foil. A four-foot-tall satellite parked in the corner. And before it, on the floor, sat a spotlight paired with a rotating color wheel — a slow, hypnotic disk of red, blue, green, and amber that painted the metallic branches in a silent, psychedelic ballet.

Bessie and Trent, my anchors to the world of oil lamps and horse-drawn memories, sat smiling in their armchairs. They were not living in the past. They were gazing at the future.

It was a message in tinsel and light: the world was going to change. It was going to become shiny, synthetic, and spectacularly strange. And it was going to be beautiful.

I left their house that night, my own mind now equipped with its own rotating color wheel. I walked back across the yard holding my mother’s hand, to our warm, coal-heated home, but I was no longer entirely in 1960. A part of me was already in orbit waiting for the future to arrive.

It gets here a little more every day.

Merry Christmas from all of us at Giant FM.

See you all next year. Same Schwinn time, same Schwinn channel.