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Remembering toys and traditions

How is your shopping going? Are you done with all but the stocking stuffers? I liked the gift suggestions written by Oren Arnold, an American writer and editor who died in 1980. These suggestions still hold good today and forever.

Christmas Gift Suggestions:

To your enemy, forgiveness,

To an opponent, tolerance,

To a friend, your heart,

To a customer, service,

To all, charity,

To every child, a good example,

To yourself, respect.

≤≤≤≤≤

Do you ever think about toys you played with as a child or old-time Christmas in general and thought those things were gone for good?

There are books where you can bring back chocolate-covered graham crackers, nonpareils chocolates, chocolate cream drops and hard candy with a yummy filling inside just by ordering from a catalog. I remember all of these, especially the chocolate cream drops and any kind of hard tack, as we called it. I especially liked the ribbon candy. It was thin and didn’t take long for it to melt in your mouth.

We had a clear plastic, spiky-looking Christmas tree where you skewered gumdrops of all colors and flavors for a table decoration and you had better have a large supply of gum drops as they seemed to disappear quickly.

Books were a big thing for me, and I liked the Uncle Wiggly, Mother West Wind and Billy Whiskers series. Chinese checkers were fun, but we always lost a few marbles of a certain color and had to substitute — then there was an argument over who was the owner of the odd-color marbles.

Remember the Little Snoopy dog? It was made of wood and would wobble about and his ears would swing when pulled. I remember three of my younger siblings tugging the same spotted dog around. It lasted a long time, because we were taught to take care of our toys.

Toys were low tech back then — powered by a child’s imagination — like the jack-in-the box that you had to wind up and never knew when the enclosed toy would jump out at you.

Pick-up sticks, yo-yo’s, Lincoln logs, tinker toys, slinkies that slowly made their way down the staircase and model airplanes that needed built and painted to your specification were other toys I remember.

As for Christmas decorations, there were the bubble lights where we stood and watched until they warmed up and would do their magic and handcrafted clip-on glass bird ornaments that were so easy to break if you were not careful when clipping them to the tree. It is told that they have been around since the early 1800s.

Do you remember angel hair? It looked very pretty when stretched across a holiday light, but it itched something terrible when touched.

There was the tinsel tree, needing a rotating color wheel to give it brightness. You couldn’t put electric lights on the aluminum branches, due to the possibility of a shock, so my parents cautioned. Everyone bought window cleaner that turned a powdery white before it was rubbed off to show a sparkling window, only many households did not wipe it off but used stensils to make all kinds of white designs on the windows. After the holidays, it would be wiped off and leave a nice clean window.

There were store made-from-scratch fruit cakes, so it was advertised. If bakers did not want to bother dicing candied fruit and beating the batter with a big wooden spoon, they settled for store bought. There also was English Christmas plum pudding that came out of a can after heating it in a pan of simmering water to warm it up for serving.

Can you remember some of these things? Actually they are available from the Vermont Country Store that labels itself “purveyors of the practical and hard to find.”

I think I will go back and see if I can find some items from past and put in an order. Maybe I can even get the grandchildren interested in some of the games instead of hammering away on their cell phones.

—–

Some fun things happened during the past month that are very worth mentioning.

First, there was the Smithfield United Methodist Women’s meeting where the entire group worked to make adorable Santa faces out of a 3-inch paintbrush, a piece of felt, some google eyes and a red nose. Glenda Ogden was the patient instructor.

Sarah Cusick had a problem when she put the white dots on the red handle that was supposed to resemble Saint Nick’s hat. She shook it to dry the white enamel hat, and the paint drops ran in streaks. Maybe she was making a Santa who got caught out in the rain.

Members all brought dimes for the “Charlotte Simmons $7.80 project.” Lorrie Greene, who kept the project going after Charlotte died, explained that if you put aside a dime in January, added two dimes for February added three in February through December, there would be $7.80 saved with little effort. This goes to the Sawka family, missionaries  in Africa that the church helps support.

Five members were acknowledged for perfect attendance at meetings through the year and were presented gifts: Betty Ruttencutter, Sandy Murphy, Cusick, Ogden and Carolyn Rea.

Elizabeth Matthews gave a reading, and Ruttencutter presided.

Judy Galbraith was a guest at the meeting.

—–

The Silver Sneakers group came together for a Christmas luncheon, with a cookie-baking contest held as well. Nancy West was the first-place winner with Sunburst Lemon Bars, and Mary Alice Meyer was second with Caramel Pumpkin Cookies.

I was a cookie judge along with Virginia Glenn and Rachel Freeland. It was a real job determining the winners as all were so tasty. Along with the winners, there were cream horns, mint cookies, cranberry drop cookies, Snickerdoodles, coconut oatmeal cookies and peanut clusters. Doesn’t that make you want to dig into the flour, sugar and shortening and start baking?

All provided recipes, and I will publish them sometime soon.

Victoria Freeland,  who is judge Rachel’s daughter and Flora’s granddaughter, was the guest speaker discussing her missionary trip to Brazil for a year.  She was in Piracicaba, Sao Paulo, where artists express themselves with colorful art on the walls of the city.

Flowers bloom in profusion, and everyone in the pictures shown by Flora looked very friendly.

The Silver Sneakers group showed appreciation for VerStraten-Merrin with a long round of applause. “I feel as if I have a lot of friends here,” she said.

The seniors played a game on how well do you know Flora? with questions such as “how many grandchildren do I have?”

There was a sale of Christmas crafts by Freeland as well.

(McCoy, a resident of Smithfield, is food editor and a staff columnist for the Herald-Star and The Weirton Daily Times. She can be contacted at emccoy@heraldstaronline.com)

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