~Denise O’Brien Van
When I was a little girl growing up in Jefferson, I got the most wonderful Christmas presents. Lots of them were identical to the gifts my sister Colleen received–red chenille bathrobes, cowgirl outfits, patch quilts made by Grandma Mae, doll buggies and books we were meant to share.
Those buggies took quite a beating over the years. Made of cloth coated with plastic, mine was burgundy and Col’s was blue. Come spring, we rolled those carriages with their high white side-walled tires along the sidewalks under the towering elms on the broken sidewalks between Brackett and Park Streets, airing our baby dolls. We went “grocery shopping” in the vacant lots north of our house, choosing “vegetables,” weeds that smelled like onions and cabbages. Some days, we’d force the neighborhood kittens and puppies into doll clothes and take them for a spin, and I know we plunked our little sister Jeannie in for a ride whenever Mom wasn’t looking
Not all of the toys on the list I faithfully mailed each year to Santa turned up beneath the Christmas tree in our little house on South Oak Street. A gift that Santa never brought was a doll house. My friend Judy Thompson had one, made of metal and peopled with a tiny family who sat on miniature furniture, but that spectacular present never appeared for me on Christmas morning.
But the toy malt mixer I’d seen in the basement toy department of Gately’s Five and Dime on the west side of the Courthouse Square was there on Christmas morning of 1951 or ‘52. I was so thrilled, so overjoyed, so eager to play with it. It was made of gritty base metal painted deep red, and its butterfly key could be wound to make the paddles whirr up a tiny ice cream drink. On that Christmas morning, I turned the key the wrong way, backwards…and stripped the flimsy gear.
No one said to me, “Oh, we’ll get you another one.” After Christmas, I used my imagination to make malts when Col and our little sister Jeannie and I played Potter’s Drug Store.
And the quilts….coverlets for Col’s and my new twin beds in the new knotty pine upstairs bedroom in the small Cape Cod on the northeast corner of Oak and Park Streets. Even tho her eyesight was failing, Grandma Mae O’Brien had made them by hand, stitching together rectangles of gray and brown wool, slipping in occasional swatches of red and blue and tying them with pink yarn to match the pink and white flowered cotton back. I slept under mine on winter nights until I went to college. What happened to it? I think Col still has hers, and isn’t she lucky, isn’t she blessed, to have a coverlet made by her Grandma when she was 8 years old??
Although my quilt is gone, I still have the books. I’ve carried them with me from Jefferson to Dubuque to Iowa City to Des Moines to Chicago and back to Des Moines and now they’re shelved in my retirement house in Jefferson. Inexpensive editions of several Louisa May Alcott novels chosen from the bookcase on the back wall in Gately’s basement, they weren’t meant to last, but there they sit on the shelves in my little library. The rag paper they’re printed on is stronger than that in the lavishly illustrated $25 books I’ve bought this Christmas for my grandchildren.
The buggies went somewhere, the housecoats were outgrown and the malt mixer probably ended up in Ernie Peterson’s dump down by the Raccoon River where Daubendiek Park is today. If only I hadn’t turned that malt mixer’s butterfly key. If only I’d never pretended to be a soda jerk at Potters, making malts with my broken toy, it probably would get a good appraisal on Antiques Road Show.
But I still have my copy of Eight Cousins, inscribed “Merry Xmas 1951..To Denise from Grandma & Grandpa O’Brien.” It was a most fragile gift, made of cheap paper glued into a cardboard cover, It has lasted a life time.
Denise O’Brien Van, a 1961 graduate of Jefferson High School, returned to live in her hometown of Jefferson in 2009.
