When it comes to making your Christmas list, and you are the youngest of nine kids, you AIM LOW. There is no Barbie Dream house and there isn’t an Atari on your list. You are smarter than that.Growing up on Pond Street we had the best field in our neighborhood that had a huge hill….well at the time we thought it was huge….all the neighborhood kids would spend the whole day sledding…from early morning until dark…..we would make the sweetest jumps and would even drag pails of water from our houses to make icy, slick trails for our flexible flyers… you know the sleds that if you hit someone at the right angle you would slice off a finger.
My great idea that year for a Christmas gift was….skis….that way I wouldn’t have to share my sled with anybody. I would show up at the field with my sweet ass plastic "skis for kids" and WOW everybody…..I would imagine myself flying down the hill with ease as my friends sharing sleds would watch in awwwwe….
So I went home and told my mother that I wanted skis…not like Rossignol's or K2’s but like plastic kids ski’s we saw at Kmart, kid's skis, pretend skis.
On Christmas morning I thought for sure I would get my skis. I unwrapped every gift….. no skis. Then my Dad reached behind the tree for one more gift and it was for me!!! He threw it to me and I opened it quickly…tearing the paper from the box…tearing the box open to find the Sunday comics bunched up as stuffing... but nothing else. I said…”Mom it’s empty.” She said “No it isn’t keep looking” so I dug to the bottom of the box …..throwing the paper left and right…my brothers and sisters watching in sweet anticipation…..that’s when I found it….. at the bottom of the box…the words so neatly written like only a mother would…………. “Pretend Skis”
