I usually got a pretty good stash of presents at Christmas time…you know, the usual toys and candy and toothbrushes and slippers. There was no reason to complain. I got dolls, of course, some that cried and said “Mama”, some whose cellophany hair you could sort of comb, and some that didn’t do anything at all. I played with them, but they were never my favorites. I preferred paper dolls over the “real” thing, dolls you could make paper clothes for, coloring them any color you wanted, breaking all of the color rules of the day, such as no green and blue together; no red and yellow together…my paper dolls’ clothes deliberately combined the forbidden and they didn’t complain one little bit.

I got a wonderful doll house, that my dad made, and I loved making miniature furniture and people to inhabit the two-story wonder, a much nicer and fancier house than the one I actually lived in.

 There were, however, two sorts of toys that I always wanted and never got, because they were “boys’ toys”, and girls shouldn’t have them. I wanted some Tinker Toys and an Erector Set (this was long before the days of Legos). I was fascinated by them and the wonderful designs, especially the Tinker Toys, that you could make and I wanted to try it too. But, no, no matter that I asked, I wasn’t taken seriously and was reminded that those were toys for boys, and I was, after all, a girl, who should play with dolls and have tea parties for them….which I did, but all the time sure that those boys’ toys would be much more fun than pouring boring fake tea and making up boring small talk with inanimate beings whose creepy smiles never faded as they sat askew in their chairs that didn’t fit them nor me very well. 

The second kind of toy I wanted was trucks and cars. I loved the miniature ones that I saw in ads and store windows, and they looked like a lot of fun. I loved how much they looked like the big ones (for quite a while in my life I wanted to be a semi-truck driver, and would wait in my front yard for the local guy who actually was one to drive by and toot and wave at me…a thrill I still get when I see a beautiful semi). I never got those, either, but I was lucky to have a next door neighbor who had a whole collection (his dad was the owner of the local gas station). He, on the other hand, kind of liked dolls, an even worse thing for boys back in the 1940s. So, I would go over to his house to play, and bring along a couple of dolls…and we’d swap…I’d play with his trucks and cars and he’d play with my dolls. If his mom happened to come by, we’d quickly swap and pretend we were each playing with our gender-appropriate toys until she left and we could go back to those toys we really liked.

There was, however, one Christmas that made up for all of the doll-heavy, automotive-light ones before. That was the Christmas that my dad got me a train…a real miniature train…a Lionel with a red engine and green cars and red cars. And tracks enough to go around the Christmas tree. And a “switch” operator for speed and starting and stopping. And about 6 various cars. And a few buildings to set up inside the tracks where the train could be stopped for whatever reason the engineer, ME, wanted. I was thrilled with this nod to my love of machinery. I knew, of course, that it also was something my dad thought was pretty cool, and he set it up, showed me how to run it, and throughout the season, probably played with it as much as I did. I didn’t mind. I finally had something that wasn’t the boring old girl stuff. And best of all, this train had a smokestack and little rubbery brown inserts of “smoke” that you could put in its smokestack that would emit real looking smoke, even if it did smell of strange (and probably toxic) chemical.

Oh, how I loved that train. We only put it up at Christmas, because, I suppose now, looking back, that there was no room in our house for it to be permanently set up. I didn’t mind. I was the only girl I knew who had a train. I didn’t mind that my cousin Donnie had a huge train set with many more buildings and fancy bridges and water towers and all those other amenities…after all, he was a boy and his father owned a Western Auto hardware store that sold stuff like that. I didn’t mind at all that he scoffed at mine…I had one, and that was more than any other girl I knew and I could pretend to be an engineer, which was almost as good as a semi driver, and it was all okay.

I’ve forgotten most of the dolls. I don’t remember much about the other toys. But I will never forget that Lionel…the present a girl shouldn’t have.

Bev Hartford for The Poplar Grove Muse