They ran downstairs, feet slipping across carpet thanks to footed pajamas, grinning with expressions of delight at a small pile of childhood happiness. They took in the loot Santa had left them with bright, wide-eyed faces, happy shrieks and unvarnished delight. It was a scene, repeated each Christmas morning throughout their young childhoods, that made the great night-before-Christmas putting-together sessions worth it. Pretty much.
Our children are both now essentially grown. One is a senior in college, the other, a senior in high school. Their toys no longer come with most assembly required, so those efforts are a thing of the past, and I do miss those days, at least a little bit. There were some Herculean efforts on those Christmas Eve evenings though, and I’m sure many parents can relate.
My introduction to this was with a Barbie kitchen – a free-standing workstation with lots of molded plastic doors and drawers. The kicker on it was, once you had it put together, there were about 500 stickers to be placed here, there and yon – a “gotcha” I thought unreasonably unfair.
Another year our daughter asked for a swing set, and Santa came through with the traditional Western Flyer model, made in West Point, complete with virtually every pole the same diameter, same color, similar lengths and pre-drilled holes in different places. Putting that one together quietly overnight in the back yard took a while. Jerry Clower once said, “It’s hard to pull a crosscut saw by yourself.” If he’d ever put together a five-bay swingset by himself, in the dark, while having to be quiet about it, he’d have gone back to solo sawing without further complaint.
I had assumed that effort would always be the record-holder for difficulty until, in his third year, the Boy asked for a train table, basically a 5-foot by 10-foot wooden table two feet tall, complete with drawers and such, to play with a wooden train set on. I figured there wouldn’t be much to putting it together.
In a mode similar to the swing set, nearly every piece was in one of two different thicknesses but in widely-varying lengths and widths. Disassembled, the toy train table came in a box that weighed about as much as a full-size Burlington Northern locomotive. I began its assembly when we got the kids to bed Christmas Eve. I drove the last screw home as the sun came up the next day.
Still, it’s hard not to feel a twinge of sadness at those moments’ final passing, not that I’m volunteering to hammer dowel pegs into fiberboard all night anytime soon. It was very special though. We thought we were giving little piles of loot to them, when they were actually giving much larger gifts to us.
Kevin Tate is the outdoors writer for the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal.
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