One of the “treasures” I found last year when I was cleaning out a cupboard was this picture of my husband as a toddler. The photograph was taken at Christmas 1950, when he was about fourteen months old. At that time, he was the only grandchild on both sides of his family, so I imagine he was doted on.
My husband’s second Christmas appears to have been a happy one. He looks pleased with his new tricycle. But he doesn’t remember that Christmas.
I asked him recently which Christmas was the earliest he remembered. “In Platte City,” he said. “The year we set up my electric train. I think I was five.”
“Was that the year you got the train?” I asked.
“No. I think I got it the year before. But that year my dad and uncle mounted it on plywood and set up the trestle.” He talked on a bit about the train. That was the year the train became something he could play with . . . carefully, so it didn’t break.
Sixty-five years later, he still has that train, though it is in his mother’s basement and hasn’t been run much in the last twenty years. He and his dad used to run it for our children and their cousins, and they all remember those times fondly. The train made an impression on two generations of his family.
I was surprised my husband didn’t remember Christmases before he was five, though I hadn’t expected him to remember when he was fourteen months old. Then I started thinking about how differently people’s memories are formed. I have some friends who don’t remember anything before they were six or seven. Others who remember things that happened before they were two, as I do.
Most of us, I hope, have more pleasant events in our lives than hurtful. More tricycles and trains and less shouting and stress. Still, though I know I had more contented moments in childhood than sad ones, my mother used to tell me, “Theresa, you only remember the bad things.” The hard times do tend to make more of an impression than when everything is going smoothly.
We are all shaped by the things that happen to us, whether we remember them or not. If we remember long-ago events, we can analyze them and maybe come to terms with them. It’s the events we don’t remember from the past that may cause us to react in the present in ways we don’t understand.
How have your early memories of holidays affected you?
