Rick Hicks Poems

Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the home

All the lights that were usually put up everywhere,
...

Boy, how things have changed! It doesn't seem that long ago, only 60 or so years, that my Christmases were so very much different than they are today.
Christmas back then was much simpler and so very much less commercial. With less than 10 TV channels, if you even had a TV, there was no constant bombardment of ads for toys, clothing, or other gifts. There were NO Christmas commercials for electronics, much less cars and other big tickets items.
Time was spent waiting for the Sears catalog, and then more time paging through it, looking for what we might want to put on our list. And then looking some more, crossing the old items off, and adding new ones. Oh, we kids knew we weren't going to get everything on our list, but just the idea of having a list at all brought some excitement. Our expectations were not way beyond the actual either. There were four kids in my family, Mom was a stay at home mother, and Dad worked two, sometimes three jobs, to keep us fed, clothed, and warm. Most times at Christmas we got one "large" present, clothing, and a few stocking size gifts.
Let me describe one of those Christmas times as best I can recall. I may have been 10 or 12 so the memory may be off but you'll get the gist of it.
...