These are some Christmas time remembrances of mine from a small Wisconsin town in the sixties.
Feel free to add your own stories to this thread, be thay small or large. Yes you can talk about your favorite toys or whatever. If nothing else tell me if you enjoyed it.
I used to walk by a house going to school that every year had it’s manger with the flood lights, and nothing else. The flood light was one of those with the rotating colored disc in front of the light so the colors changed. Charles Hibner used to decorate his giant spruce every year, way before miniature lights and big displays were common. In the 80’s he told me his electric bill was about $150 in December for the tree. The whole town drove by the tree because it was the best display around. One house always decorated three trees and put one on each floor in front of three windows one above the other. The house across from church always put those large c8 lights on their pine that was about 10 feet tall when they started. Back then I and my cousins would spend the whole weekend at their pond ice skating and sometimes have a fire on the bank later roasting wieners, and making popcorn over the coals. The night was spent in an old house with the large central rooms and the small narrow side rooms typical of farm houses in the area. The antique wood stove got restoked an hour before bedtime, and then the bedroom on the main floor became a sweat lodge. A hundred degree room made for poor sleeping, until it got to be cooler at 1:00 in the morning.
I loved the heater grate at grandpa’s over the wood furnace in the basement. The old farms had wood furnaces put in, but mostly used massive grates and convection air currents to heat the house. All the upper rooms had grates that covered a hole in the floor open to the room below. The typical ceiling height was 10 or 12 feet, not 8 like many are used to today. As a kid you occasionally got yelled at for letting the toys drop down on the adults below. Spill a bag of marbles by the grate and let them rain down a 12 foot drop and you’ll understand the reason. The main grate over the furnace was about 30 inches by 36 inches rectangular. When I got soaked playing in the snow, I could come in and sit on the grate with hot air always rising out of it. They had a fan that came on sometimes to blow it out in a big rush of heat, and nothing since has felt so good as that hot air grate at grandpa’s farm after being cold and wet. The old farms had lots of interesting gadgets. Grandma had a flour bin the size of a dishwasher. They tilted out at the top and were hinged at the bottom. A loaded one was hard to open, and on closing could have taken off part of a finger. Going through the gadgets drawer was great. They had a gadget for everything. An egg yolk separator, a hand cranked nut meat grinder, an egg slicer, a hand crank meat grinder, a spiky metal tenderizing hammer, and lots of great cookie cutters. At meals they got out those heavy bright colored plates, and I being the first grandchild got the color I wanted. The Christmas tree was about 12 feet tall, and they had a lot of bells on it. All the branches had been strung with individual tinsel strands. The ornaments were fancy ones too. The size run from balls an inch big to ones, 5 inches round. The top had a fragile glass ornament about 12 inches long looking like a pike sticking through a round ornament. Most people had something similar on top or a star. Some stars were bought, but many were made. The lights were c7 sized on most peoples trees and the lights came in many shapes and colors. Some people even had molded light bulbs like Santa, and then they were painted to look the part. The lights could have foil reflectors that went between the light and bulb base. It redirected the heat outward along with the light, so it helped reduce drying out the tree. The needles by a bulb could turn brown and brittle, so you needed to never leave a tree lit unattended. I know that somebody would be in the paper every year because their lights torched the tree and the house. My favorite lights were the bubble lights bubbling away like crazy. One of the ornaments that were really neat were the ones with the reflective fan blades in the middle. You hung them over a light bulb and the fan turned scattering light or turning some part of the ornament with it.
The toys we wanted back then were really model trains and planes, Erector sets, Tinker Toys, models to assemble and paint, chemistry sets, microscopes, BB guns, butterfly nets, hula hoops, Duncan Yo-yo’s, Frisbees, Trouble, Head Ache, Ants n The Pants, Cootie, Barrel of Monkeys, Hot Wheels, steel Tonka Toy vehicles, that you could sit on, throw around and a car tire didn’t always bust, Ertel tracks and farm equipment, once again made of steel and rugged, bicycles with baskets to get your equipment to the field or pond across town.
Main street Portage in those days covered four blocks in length and one block to the side streets. The two main intersections had wires strung in an X over them and garland running over them. The center got an oversized lit plastic ornament hung from it. Each of the light poles had one hung from them also. The main street had large bullhorn speakers on the buildings, from which issued Christmas music of a proper type. It may be Gene Autry singing Rudolf or Silent Night. Do you remember Yori Yorgesson singing Yingle Bells. Friday from 7:00 to 9:00 PM was the prime time for shopping. The city turned out for a social chat and promenade from store to store, and you stopped often and talk to people you new. You met distant cousins and your mother’s school friends, all the time, because That was the night set aside to dress nice and socialize.
I got my first watch one Christmas from the Jeweler by the market square. Getting it was a bit of a right of passage between father and son back then as watches weren’t cheap back then. It was a Timex with a crystal on the back instead of a metal plate. You could see the gears and springs working away so it was the coolest watch anybody at school ever had. The BB gun came a few years after that leaning in a corner of the living room Christmas morning. I never shot my eye out for some reason.
