Dear Santa:
You may not remember me. After all, you have so many kids to look after, and let's face it, I haven't been one for a long time. All the same, I'm writing this letter to you as, well, a testimonial, you might say. An appreciation of a job well done.
You see, way back in 1951, I was a three-year-old, living with my parents in a small college town in Pennsylvania. My father was a struggling student, making a family with Mom and I on the little he got from his GI Bill checks and the pittance he earned working nights at the gas station down the street. Mom had her hands full just raising me. What we lacked most of all was money. We were struggling like many other young families just after the War, and though we were getting by -- just -- we were well and truly broke.
One Saturday morning, not long after Thanksgiving, Dad took me out to see something he thought I'd very much like to see. It was a hardware store a couple of miles out of town, and it was also a Lionel dealership. I was was astonished out of my three-year-old mind! There was an operating layout -- a big operating layout -- there, where trains were always running all by themselves. Behind the glass partitions that surrounded the platform to keep eager young fingers like mine from inadvertently causing a derailment on the main line, they clattered back and forth, passenger trains and freight trains, whistling and honking, smoking, a blur of color and animation and miniature headlights.
And on the walls, seemingly reaching from the earth to far above the sky, were stacked shelves, shining with the most amazing trains, locomotives, cars, and strange little accessories whose purpose I couldn't yet imagine. My eyes and ears and mind overloaded on it all, and I could only stare, trying to absorb the wondrous vision, without success.
I remember Dad pointing out one of the circling trains to me and saying something. I don't know, though, what I answered in return -- I was still in a trance, and not thinking clearly, even by three-year-old standards.
I remembered that transcendental experience in the weeks to come as something that might have happened in a dream. It grew more and more remote from the everyday world in my memory, until I couldn't be entirely sure that it had happened at all.
Christmas morning came, almost before I knew it. I can remember coming into the living room of our little flat. The tree was lit with its scorching series light bulbs, and festooned with paper chains Mom had made from colored construction paper. And underneath it was…
At first I couldn't wrap my mind around what I saw. Mom and Dad had to keep pointing it out to me. I crept closer…
It was a Lionel train. A 2026 -- the Korean War model -- with a caboose, a black gondola and two silvery Sunoco tank cars. Just like the one I'd seen in the hardware store. Unbelievable.
That 2026 and its consist still lives and runs today. That train circled our Christmas trees through the marching years to come, and through changes we could never have imagined. Dad passed on to a better world eight or nine years ago, but it continues to be a centerpiece of my Christmases to this day. When my mother comes to visit our place, she always insists that I run the train for her so we can both remember that unbelievably long-ago Christmas when all things were possible and a bright future lay before us all.
And you know what, Santa? I'm an educated man. I know now that that 2026 set was a demonstrator, and it was on sale for only about twelve dollars. Twelve was a lot of dollars for us in 1951, and I'm certain that Dad could never have afforded to pay for it all by himself.
That only leaves you, Santa. It had to have been you who enabled my father to bring us that train, and establish a family tradition that goes on to this day and will continue beyond me.
And so I'm not here to ask you for anything, Mr. Claus. The trains I can get for myself, now, and my wife and I have a comfortable life since I retired from teaching at the University. So instead of a wish list of things I'd like you to bring, I just want to give you my thanks, for that Christmas and for all the ones that followed. Most have been joyous and warm, but I've also lived through some that were about as low as it was possible to get. But the memories of the ones that had gone before -- and the anticipation of the better ones yet to come -- pulled us through. And that was all thanks to you, sir. To you and to all your incarnations here on earth, I offer my profoundest gratitude.
Wishing you as much happiness as you've brought to me and so many other three-year-olds,
"Balshis"
