Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays!
The last few days before Christmas! Santa’s sleigh is in the shed for its scheduled maintenance check, inspection, and servicing. Rudolph and the other reindeer are out
on the training grounds for their final pre-flight practices, equipment checks, and run thru. Little Adolpho, the Lead Weather Elf, is frantically reviewing and revising last-minute weather forecasts and forwarding them on to the route planners for Christmas Eve deliveries.
Production elves are working overtime finishing, polishing, prepping, and wrapping.
Mrs. Claus is busy in the kitchen keeping everyone fed and on their toes as the clock ticks down to Christmas Eve. Stacks of freshly-baked holiday cookies and treats! Gallons of hot chocolate! Red-and-white striped candy canes are rolling off the Kandy Kitchen assembly line.
All residents of the North Pole Christmas Crew are feverishly working around the clock to meet Santa’s Christmas Eve departure schedule.
Back at home, how are things going for you? In a rush to get ready? Shopping yet to be done? Gifts to wrap? Cookies and treats to be made? Final decorations and stockings to be hung? Things can certainly get hectic this time of year.
I am sure other folks my age remember the old-fashioned holiday window displays in the department store windows. New dolls and toys on display. Bicycles, BB Guns, and Baseball Gloves. Red wagons. Teddy Bears. Model trains running thru tunnels, across bridges, and round and round in circles. Toy airplanes flying thru the air. Cold little noses pressed to the window glass to get the very bestest and closest look. So many wished-for presents and dreams in view and just out of reach beyond the window glass!
Call me old-fashioned, but I miss the old department store window displays. Perhaps it is merely my more advanced age now in the seventies, but today’s window displays, if you find any, are no longer magical for me and simply not what they used to be.
So I thought maybe, just perhaps, you might enjoy coming along with me to spend a few minutes wistfully looking back on a past era of Christmas magic. If we hurry, we might even get up close for a good view of the model trains!
Put on your coat, scarf, and gloves, and let’s go!
As a child emersed in the magic of the Christmas season, the department store display windows seemed to make Christmas even more special.
It was a highly anticipated trip all in itself to visit the department stores downtown at Christmas to see the display windows and visit with Santa Claus each year. Our family had lunch out, dining at the downtown cafeteria when home cooking was the norm, and dining out was reserved only for very special occasions. Needless to say, the yearly trip to see the store windows and Santa Claus qualified as a very special occasion, indeed!
I know you are busy too at this time of year, so will not keep you. Merely taking this opportunity to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas along with all of the Joys, Happiness, and Peace of the Holiday Season!
Maybe you better go check on the kids now. Looks like they are taking tinsel and things in hand and getting their own last-minute preparations in order for Santa’s visit!
We hope you enjoyed our nostalgic look back at the Christmases of our childhood and 
that it may have brought back to mind some cherished memories and times for yourself, as well.
To all of our follower family here, my story character friend Little Red Bear and I wish you and yours a Very Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday Season! — Jim (and Red!)
Joyeux Noël ! ¡Feliz Navidad! Buon Natale! Frohe Weihnachten!
Merry Christmas!
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