But today, I am remembering something of Dad's memories. There used to be Christmas lights that had individual bulbs. When I was a child, Dad had one from his own childhood. It was a Santa Head. It was oval, but had specific wrinkles in the beard and slightly raised eyes. I can't even imagine how such things were made.
But, back then, the bulbs were all incandescent (with heated wire filaments that glowed for you young'uns). They burned out regularly, causing the entire string to go dark. Such bulbs typically lasted only a few years.
Well, Dad had this one Santa Head bulb that he cherished. It just kept working. Sometimes it took some tapping. If you tapped old fimament bulbs, sometimes the heated ends would re-connect. Some years, the bulb wouldn't light and Dad would keep tapping it in all directions. And most years, it would light up again.
There came a day when it just didn't. He spent time for days tapping at it on a light string he had in the basement for repairing stuff. Finally, he understood it wasn't going to light up again. I was probably about 12 then, and I wasn't there when he gave up trying to get the Santa bulb to light up "one more time". But I noticed it sitting on his home desk for weeks. And then, one day, it wasn't there.
When you are a child, you don't really understand your parents as having been children themselves once. You just know them as "adults" I think that, on the day I noticed the bulb missing from his desk, I understood that he had lost a precious childhood memory. And maybe I grew up a little that day.
I found this image today.
It looks like the same one. Memory says it is the same one. Dad died in 2014. When I brought him here to live with me in 2012, he might have remembered it, but he went downhill fast. I wish I had thought to find and given it to him while he was here "compos mentis"...
2 comments:
An interesting story. I had a couple of precious objects from my childhood that were just ordinary things to everyone else but special to me. One was the kitchen clock. Where I sat at the breakfast table, I looked almost straight at it, so I spent a lot of hours looking at that clock over the years. I was absolutely stunned when I visited my parents' home one day - long after I'd grown up and moved out - and there was a different clock on the kitchen wall. The old one had 'died' and they'd simply gone out and replaced it. Sensible enough - but ... but ... it was, at least as far as I was concerned, a family heirloom; something very special. I hadn't appreciated that no one else felt the same way about it as I did! LOL
Megan
Sydney, Australia
That is a nice light bulb. When we cleaned out my childhood home in 2003, I found a string of Little Red Riding Hood lights I remembered from the 70's. I am never getting rid of those. I will leave them to my great niece who is already working on being a hoarder at age 4 :)
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