The Christmas train

I had an unforgettable Christmas as a boy of about 8 or 10–at least I learned some things about “wanting.” I had been studying intensively the Christmas catalogs from Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Wards since their arrival some time before Thanksgiving. The more I studied, the more I wanted a train set. I had such a vision of joy to imagine starting and stopping and watching a little train, all my own, pulling its load of cars around and around a track. I just could not imagine anything more wonderful.

I presented to my mother my need to receive a train set for Christmas on several occasions. Finally she informed me that she and my dad had budgeted $5 each for Dorothy and me for Christmas toys (our grand-children will not even be able to relate to the tinyness of this amount, but times and the availability of money were different then). There were no train sets in either of the catalogs for this amount. The least expensive set cost eight dollars, and was cheap-looking O-gauge passenger train with a short oval track. I was shocked at this news.

Finally my mother bargained that if I wanted to use money I had saved (I had 4 or 5 dollars hoarded away), I could add that to the $5 they would pay and get a train. Even with this arrangement, the O-gauge passenger train wa the only one I could afford. My sadness turned to joy and I agreed to this bargain, even though she warned me that this would be the only present I would get.

The days that followed were filled with excited anticipation. Finally it was Christmas morning. There under our Christmas tree was a box for me that contained my wonderful train set. I eagerly opened it, and soon I was setting it up. I turned on the switch and the train began to go around and around its track.

I watched it for a few minutes, and felt such a sense of boredom and emptiness. There was nothing I could do with this thing except watch it go round and round. Here was the thing that I had dreamed and fanticized about for most of my waking minutes for the last two months and I had no more interest in it.

I think I learned a lesson to be more careful about letting my wants carry away my imagination to make stupid choices about things that were of little nor no value, and that material acquisitions tended to not give much enduring satisfaction.

[Picture: this is definitely NOT a picture of my toy train.]