By Brian Hoffman
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Merry Christmas everyone!!
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. That is if you don’t mind being cold, slipping on ice, shoveling snow or worrying about how you’re going to get your car up that hill to go to work. Or, sometimes, if you work for the newspaper.
You may notice I don’t have our usual sports coverage in the paper this week. There’s a reason for that, and it’s called Christmas.
I have early deadlines this week so my colleagues at the paper don’t have to work Christmas Eve. I was given a deadline of Monday morning to have all my sports finished when I usually get until Tuesday night or Wednesday noon, depending on the paper.
Same thing happens at Thanksgiving, and I was in the office for most of the day Saturday and Sunday to get the games in. I even managed to get home in time to watch the Eagles blow a 21-0 lead against Dallas in the late game that Sunday.
For Christmas, it’s a little different. Same deadlines, but last weekend I took my wife and two grandsons to Pennsylvania to celebrate Christmas. We left Friday, visited that night, went to the Sixers game against Dallas on Saturday night and returned Sunday. So, a Monday morning deadline left little time to catch up on the many games played over the weekend. Rest assured I’ll catch you up in next week’s paper.
It’s always a chore juggling the work schedule around the holidays, as I’m the only guy in the sports department for four papers. I just wouldn’t feel right not visiting the relatives for Christmas, so it takes some planning.
When I was a kid it was easy. Get up Christmas morning and enjoy the most Wonderful Time of the Year. When I went to college, 400 miles away, it got a little tougher.
I was at Roanoke College back when Charlie Moir was the basketball coach for the Maroons. It doesn’t seem like that long ago but, in reality, it was over 50 years ago. Time flies, especially when you get older.
When I was in school I did the statistics at Roanoke College basketball games and also worked for the Sports Information Department. Roanoke always hosted a Christmas Tournament at the Salem Civic Center so it was important that I was there. I would drive home to Pennsylvania after exams, celebrate Christmas, drive back to RC for the basketball tournament, then back to PA until second semester began.
To make things more complicated the dorms were closed over Christmas and the heat was turned down. I had to sleep somewhere, and one year I snuck into the fraternity house for the days I was in Salem for the basketball tournament. One night I was awakened by Harold McCann, who some of you may remember, who was head of security at the time. He told me I couldn’t sleep there, but luckily Harold was a big basketball fan so he said I could stay as long as no one else was in there with me.
Once I started working for the paper, in 1974, I never failed once to get home to Pennsylvania for Christmas. When I was single it was no problem, because Pennsylvania WAS Christmas. However, once I got married I had Christmas at two places, and every year I had to juggle it around sporting events to cover like high school and college winter sports. So, forgive me if the Friday night results aren’t in this week’s paper. Like I said, I’ll catch you up next week.
Christmas brings back lots of memories. I still remember getting my first bicycle, and that was a big deal in the ‘60s because that was my mode of transportation for many years. I can still see in my mind those two red bicycles, one for me and one for my sister, on Christmas morning.
I was talking about bikes with my wife the other day. You don’t see kids riding them like you did when I was growing up. Most of the people I see on bikes these days are adults wearing leotard pants, shirts with all kinds of advertisements and helmets. Where are the kids?
We rode our bikes everywhere. It wasn’t unusual in the summer for me to take off on my bike at 10 o’clock in the morning and not come home until supper time at 5 pm. Then I’d eat and be off again, usually to the pool or the baseball field.
And I never wore a helmet. I’m not saying that’s good, I’m just saying it’s a fact. And I never knew anyone who got a head injury from falling off their bike. Were we just tougher, luckier or what?
Another clear memory is receiving my electric football game. I wanted one SO BAD and on Christmas morning it was not under the tree. I was certainly disappointed, but didn’t want to sound ungrateful because my parents always made sure my sister and I had a nice Christmas.
Then my grandparents, God bless their souls, came over for Christmas dinner. I could see “Gramps” carrying a package wrapped in holiday paper about the size an electric football game might be. It was a top-of-the-line model, with three dimensional players and a cool scoreboard. It had magnetic balls, not the felt ones like the cheaper models. You felt special if you had magnetic balls.
As I mentioned, my parents always made sure we had a nice Christmas. They weren’t rich, but they weren’t poor, either. They were hard-working Pennsylvania German folks who earned everything they had.
My dad came from a family of 14 kids, although four of them had died before he was born, three in the flu epidemic of 1918 and one of a heart defect. My dad was born in 1926, the 13th of 14, and he would have been 99 Thanksgiving week if he was still with us.
When you’re one of many and growing up on a farm in the depression, Christmas could be tough. He never talked about it but I know he didn’t get a lot of Christmas presents as a child. In fact, I still have one of his presents in my corner cupboard at our house. It’s a small wrought-iron tractor that was his favorite Christmas present when he was a kid. It was the only thing Santa brought on Christmas morning, but it was special.
My dad joined the Navy during World War II, came home and got a good union factory job and married the love of his life, who I called mom. He made a good life for our family and that tractor always reminded me of how lucky we were.
Have you ever seen those “Hess Trucks” the oil company puts out every year? Well, my dad would buy one of those trucks for me, and himself, every Christmas. He was too old to play with it, but he still got excited when he’d stop for gas and the new Hess Trucks, in the green and white boxes, were neatly stacked by the register. He’d buy two, but I’d never get mine until Christmas morning.
That tradition lasted until he passed away in the summer of 2018. I was 65 years old and still finding a gift-wrapped Hess Truck under the tree when we went to visit at Christmas.
I have several of those big plastic tubs you can get at Wal-Mart filled with Hess Trucks, still in the box. I kept getting them a few years after my dad died, because it had been such a tradition at our house. As I grew older I realized he loved those trucks so much because his dad couldn’t afford stuff like that when he was a kid. Obviously they didn’t have Hess Trucks back then, but they did have toy trucks and fire engines and the like. As an adult, he was making up for lost time.
And you know what? I have a bunch of grandchildren and even great-grandchildren and among the group are three little boys age five and under. My wife and I decided we would start a new tradition this year and buy them Hess Trucks. And really, they’re pretty cool. This year’s edition is a two-car stock car set that would make Michael Jordan stand up and take notice.
Merry Christmas to all, and keep on truckin’.
[Photo Caption]: Above is my dad’s favorite Christmas present when he was a kid. Actual size is about five inches long. Below is one of the many Hess Trucks I found under the tree.
