The holidays tend to encourage memories to go into overdrive as we recall Christmases past. We often wax poetic about favorite traditions of our families – the parts and pieces that are now so deeply engrained in our celebrations that we cannot imagine the season without them.
After the Parental Units and offspring were snug at their houses to watch this year’s Christmas snow, Mr. Fix-It and I treated ourselves to a bi-annual viewing of the Arnold Family video – a collection of Super 8 movies pieced together into a single video tape. The original celluloid strips beginning to crumble, they were compiled for posterity in 1995 so we could let the younger generations get a picture of the people and places about which they so often hear us old folks share during the Arnold Family Freefor- All.
Our Super 8 movie camera was quite a stateof- the-art home movie maker in 1955. Daddy had ordered it from one of his suppliers at City Pharmacy and it arrived just a few days before my second Christmas. My brothers laugh that the only way their faces were photographed was if they squatted down to do something with their 20-month-old baby sister.
“First Film” was the inaugural reel my mother shot as my father was busy filling prescriptions and selling toys at the drug store that year. Not known for her technology prowess, Mother’s debut as a filmmaker was highlighted with out-of-focus Christmas parade segments while the close-ups of her nostrils were crystal clear.
The Arnold Family video, as we call it, documents the year of the ugly doll, the popularity of the Fanner 50 (my brother Steve envisioned himself as the gunfighter extraordinaire), the advent of telecommunications as evidenced by 1955’s shiny silver toy switchboard, Bob’s Carom board, Haase’s technical gadgets and books, and a parade of that most treasured of kid gifts: clothes. We oohed and aahed over that last one, but the items never make it out of the boxes on film.
By 1961, the Super 8 had been abandoned for the more glamorous still camera as it became more difficult to capture all four kids at once on Christmas morning. With the two oldest in college and the third a suave eighth grader, still photography provided more satisfactory results. That was the year I received my first Barbie and my parents launched into several years of Christmas-to-New-Year Barbiethons emblazoned in my memory bank.
Since kids tend to get the same types of toys, all of my friends got Barbies the same year I did. Jim Griffeth’s Barrow 5 & 10 did a booming business in Barbie as Santa shopped there for dolls, clothes and accessories.
From Christmas of 1961 forward, group Barbie play became a holiday tradition as this bunch of prepubescent girls would load up our parents’ cars with our fresh-from-the North-Pole cardboard dream houses, sherbet-colored sports cars, and beaucoups Barbie logo-emblazoned plastic doll cases. We would migrate to somebody’s living room for Barbiethons that lasted for days. One’s worth in the realm of Barbie collecting was measured by whether our Barbie assemblage included the black Solo in the Spotlight ensemble complete with fulllength white evening gloves and microphone or the elegant pink satin Enchanted Evening with its swirled train, white faux-fur stole, and rhinestone studded shoes. The coup de gras was having made the ultimate sacrifice of Christmas money to have secured one’s very own Wedding Day Set with bouquet, pearlaccented veil, blue garter and graduated pearl necklace. It was the determining factor as to the seriousness of one’s Barbie devotion.
Out in my neighborhood, Patti and Pam Haley, Kea Good, Sue Parkerson, Karen Farmer, Anita Mooney, Lynne Esco and I would take over a room in somebody’s house where we set up Barbie neighborhoods – for days. If our parents would drive us, we’d get together with Lisa Maginnis, Nancy Crook, Charisse Gresham, Beth Estes, Susan Nix, Jenny Stansell, Teeny Allison, and others who lived too far away to walk or bicycle among. Our parents would find tiny shoes and handbags for weeks afterward.
As time passed, some would become too old for Barbie and she would be relegated to the attic or basement tossed aside like a pair of old shoes. Mine are somewhere in the hinterlands of the Parental Units’ attic – my blonde bouffant-coifed Barbie, Ken with the flocked hair that rubbed off so he resembled a dog with mange, Midge whose auburn flip was cut into a more sophisticated Patti Boyd-do, and others.
My parents’ attic needs a good going over. There’s no telling how many Christmas memories await rediscovery. I might actually find my Barbies.
Helen Person is a Winder resident and columnist for the Barrow Journal. You can reach her at helenperson@windstream.net.
