All I Want for Christmas

When I was a child, my family was never rich. We weren’t dirt poor either. I think we fluxuated between lower middle class to upper middle class.

Like every family, we had our Christmas traditions. We always opened our gifts on Christmas morning, then dressed and went to my paternal grandparents house for Christmas Dinner. The family would all sit around after dinner to talk and the kids would usually go out to play.

Every Christmas I received one “large” gift and several smaller ones. I think my favorite gift of all time was a portable radio that I got in 1959. Portable radios were just coming into style. It was a rather large radio—about the size of a Sears catalog and used the big D batteries. It only picked up AM stations. Radios of that era were not equipped to listen to FM.

Before that, my favorite gift was a 45 rpm record player. It would play up to six records in a row. Songs were much shorter back then and six records would amount to about 15 to 18 minutes of music.

I liked recorded music then and I still groove on recorded music.

I knew of other kids who got gifts galore. They would get five or six “large” gifts. When we would see each other the day after Christmas they would always be telling about all their nifty presents…footballs, basketballs, bicycles, skates, board games, etc. Then they would ask me what I got. I learned early on to tell them, “I got everything I wanted”. It was the truth. My wants just weren’t as big as their wants.

Even today, when somebody asks me what I got for Christmas, I reply, “everything I wanted.” And today, as in years past, my wish list isn’t big or complicated. I enjoy giving much more than receiving.

But every Christmas I hear people bragging about all they received for Christmas. I’m glad they’re happy. I may not get as much, but I get “everything I want” and that’s enough for me.