I have no idea what brought to mind Christmas gifts as we just enter summer in St. Louis. Perhaps it was because I was playing with my newest toy, a Nintendo DS I received for Father's day, that made me think of other cool gifts I've received.
One year at my parent's house, adding to all the usual magic of Christmas time, a sign appeared on our basement door. To paraphrase (due to foggy memories) it said, "Santa's Workshop. Do not enter."
OH. MY. GOSH!!!! What could be going on in the basement? It was very hard not going into the basement, we had a family room area finished off there, tools, rock collections, Lincoln logs and other fun stuff to play with. In particular, when the weather was bad and us kids didn't play outside, the basement was the next big place. It could have been sealed off for just a week or two, but it seemed like an eternity.
I don't even remember what age I was when this was going on, but I do remember that the suspense was totally killing me! It seemed like Christmas would never come.
Finally, Christmas day came and we could go to the basement. I don't remember the exact sequence of events and gift opening, but the important thing is that my brother and I received our own HO scale model train set. My dad and at least one friend of his had set up a train table with layout and several complete trains that was amazingly cool. He even put some of his old American Flyer buildings and accessories on the layout, which I thought was the coolest thing...even though they were the wrong scale. This really beat a little circle of track around the Christmas tree!
Over the years, I had almost endless fun tinkering with the many aspects of model railroads. I made train cars, engines, buildings, messed around with the electronics, etc. There was no end to the creative things that could be done. Very few of the projects ever got completed, but I gained some knowledge and got to exercise my creativity at the same time.
When we moved to a new house, the original train layout became a slot car track and we built a larger, open-grid layout that I tinkered with even through college when there was time. We disassembled the layout years ago, but I still have dreams of building a new one. It will have to wait until my wife and I have space, somewhere, though. We live in a very small house, so this will not happen anytime soon!
This hobby is even something that my wife and I could enjoy together. She also has model building skills, and in fact (a topic for another post) she built a very nice doll house in May of this year, complete with electric lights. For the time being, I satisfy my train interests with trips to the excellent Museum of Transportation in St. Louis, but I dream of the day I can build a new layout of my own.
Before I came along dad was a train nut. We have a set he built from scratch, along w/ electric street lights and everything. I used to get to sit on the stool w/ my hat and whistle and play for hours..
Now it just collects dust :-(
Posted by: MP | June 25, 2008 at 12:11 PM
When I was little and stayed at Grandma and PawPaws a lot I played in the basement a lot. Well one Christmas Grandma put up a sign similar to that and it just about killed me in the suspense.
Posted by: Rebecca | June 30, 2008 at 09:13 AM