Paul Sassone

I call it my Magical Christmas Nostalgia Tour.

I take it every year in the hope I can actually recapture, recreate, actually inhabit what and how I felt when I was a child at Christmas.

Luckily for that purpose I still live near where I grew up.

I hop in the car and drive into Maywood. The apartment building in which we lived until I was in sixth grade still is there, though a lot of my childhood landmarks aren’t. But what is now isn’t the point.

I don’t want reality. I want magic. What I want to do is conjure up helping my Dad carry the Christmas tree up three flights of stairs, or being my brother’s accomplice in knocking over that tree. I want to

sit cross-legged on the floor listening to the Cinnamon Bear on the radio as my Mother cooked dinner. I want to pretend sleep on Christmas eve while straining my ears to hear sleigh bells on the roof (lucky

for me we lived on the top floor) — all in my mind, all in my heart.

It’s just a short drive to where I spent the rest of my childhood in Bellwood.

There’s the old house, completely made over and re-sided. A family lives there. And if this were a TV show I would knock on the door, explain I used to live there and be invited inside for a visit.

But, I’m too shy and the family might be armed. Never can tell these days.

So, I just park and attempt to call up memories, feelings, any scraps of past times — my past times — that may linger near my old home.

I see where Eddie used to live. And Tom’s house. They don’t live here any more, either.

The neighborhood no longer knows me. It doesn’t know the Christmas mornings Mike and I would explode from the bedroom to rip into chemistry sets and trains and castles, and garages (with elevator) and cap guns and Lincoln Logs and stockings crammed with walnuts and redolent oranges. It doesn’t know how my brother and sister and I would squeal with delight while our dad slumped in his chair, nursing Band-Aids on his hand, exhausted from working on something late into the night.

Even in my car I think I can smell the turkey roasting. I can see aunts and uncles slogging through the snow to share that turkey, all those turkeys over the years.

I know none of this is here anymore.

But when I come home every year I can —  or at least try hard — to keep those Christmases alive.

In my mind.

In my heart.

After a while I drive off and go home.

Because it is Christmas now.

–Remembering childhood Christmases–