THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST Christmas 1975

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST
Christmas 1975

A little scaled-down from previous Christmases, not like I cared then. Stockings and associated piles go from L-R Tommy, Bobby and me. Took a look at a few of the things I dawdled over in the last responsibility-free months of my life, just prior to kindergarten:’

The Sesame Street Monsters! LP – A confusing cover: monsters, some nice, others with arched eyebrows and scary fangs, hovering over a terrified Muppet-waif. I remember wondering (not in so many words): this is scary-looking — why is this supposed to be “good”? Probably the source of this anecdote about me and my brother. Bobby and I listen to a lot of records at this time, basically cheapo kidsploitation from the Peter Pan and Disneyland record labels, things he raided from my parents’ collection, and sometimes things he hears from the radio (like Dickie Goodman’s “Mr. Jaws”). Bobby had a mechanical aptitude, liked poking into the inner workings of things, rejiggering them to make them do things they weren’t supposed to do (The floor of his room was uncrossable with bare feet as it would be covered in broken things.) and records would be progressively destroyed inna Christian Marclay-stylee. One record you can almost see on his pile, The Little Drummer Boy, had a passage that when sped up sounded exactly like this but very fast: Apple Cider! PPHT! Apple Cider! PPHT! Apple Cider! PPHT! In my mind I imagined a long line of people moved by conveyor belt to a pipe that squirted out the drink into each person’s mug. I don’t even remember the ultimate fate of my records. The next record I definitely remember playing is Anne Murray’s Let’s Keep It That Way, right when “You Needed Me” came out in 1978. I play that exactly once. When I finally get records of my own again in early 1984, I have to completely relearn how to operate a turntable.

The Mouse Factory LP — A soundtrack to a Disney-related television series that ended several years before, described by one site as a “series showing clips of Walt Disney movies linked by visitors to the Disney Studio” and “live action comedy segments with guest comedians surrounding clips and full cartoons” on another. I don’t remember that show but I was totally flipping mad for the Disney thing at the time, as that year twenty-year-old b&w The Mickey Mouse Club shows get re-syndicated, running on the local independent TV channel WNEW (now part of the Fox juggernaut, argh). I harbor a not-so-secret desire to be a star on the show, to sing and dance and be one of the gang yet be my own self, only I know it’d never happen because I still had problems “holding it in.” Strange, foreign even to think that back then color and black & white mingled so effortlessly on television, but then 100% color programming on network television is less than a decade old by ‘75. Anyway, much as I loved the show I got insulted being equated with a not-quite-human mouse. This is why I don’t care whether you call me Mike or Michael as long you don’t call me Mickey.

Casper the Friendly Ghost: Haunted House Tales LP — An odd thing to get for Christmas but I liked the Casper cartoons a lot, as it was another positively ancient bit of cultural offal that the independent networks were showing at the time to fill time. I’m having difficulties detailing what was so appealing to my mind about Haunted Houses: maybe “the transformation of the familiar” or as I might put it at the time “everything…everything is. different. there.” If I could be sure I knew then what “everything” could mean. I had a goggle-eyed fascination for ruin and destruction, which was part of an even more primal fascination with before and after, or the slow fade or one state to another — you’d get a lot of that on TV, what with the transformed-realities of stop-motion and time-lapse photography figuring large in educational programming. I would play “earthquake” with my Fisher-Price playsets after watching the 1974 movie on cable TV, this year or the next.

The Berenstain Bears in the Bears’ Nature Guide — You can’t even see this at all, it’s propped on the couch. Only three things I can still recall about it: the yellow cover, which I once tried reproducing with tracing paper; a page spread I couldn’t bear to look at, as it showed what an ocean pier looked like once the water receded, filled with squirmy, shelled, foot-repelling life; and a page spread with a composite drawing showing all the varieties of landscape (marsh, isthmus, mountain, bay, plain — I admit some of these are guesses) that I could trace possible paths through — Caspar David Friedrich’s Rainy Day Fun-time Book. I like the faint crispy-crunchy concern this gift shows, and it makes me think of other things I had at the time with a faint ecological flavor to them, like the at-once awesome and thoroughly sick Kenner Family Tree House, a toy modeling a family “living with nature” made of a plastic that won’t biodegrade for hundreds of years, oh joy. Also, Charlie Brown’s Super Book Of Things To Do And Collect, on Bobby’s pile of stuff and hence not my own, which highlighted the joys of cataloging of natural things like shells and leaves. I’m sensing that even back then I had a definite preference towards books with galaxies of facts over those with narratives, a preference that reverberates through other book choices of mine throughout my life: Richard Scarry, The Book of Lists, record guide books, Joyce and Pynchon. You can blame TV, if you like. TV don’t care.

The Scribbler’s First Word Book — Practically invisible’even in the higher-res scan I’ve supplied, but I know it’s there, the orange triangle above and to the left of my pile of record albums, with a little corner of the cartoon owl on the cover. Almost singlehandedly taught me how to print upper- and lowercase letters months before kindergarten, though by the time my everyday print handwriting started looking a little like the impossibly perfect letters in the book it was time to fuck up script, ain’t that a bitch, eh? The big wonderful point of pride here was that I was doing this on my own, propping myself in front of the television with a magic marker copying letters. Likewise, thanks to a nameless book on Tommy’s pile (he seems to have received it two Christmases in a row), I knew all the fifty states before I hit kindergarten (Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California…), and started watching the evening news religiously because there would always be maps; then there was a cookbook that I used to read the chapter titles (Artichokes, Asp-ah-RAH-gus, Beans, Broccoli, Brussell Sprouts…), then came learning the days of the week, the months of the year, the twelve signs of the Zodiac…Is this my intellectual axial age? An arrival into The World? I got along pretty well, me in hyperactive state of hunt-and-peck discovering and manic listing, nursing my obsessions of my own and, later, in Kindergarten. In contrast, I can’t even remember who taught my 1st Grade class, neither name nor face. (Actually, I might remember more had my grandfather not thrown out the box that held nearly every single assignment me and my brothers completed in elementary school, among other mementos, at some point in the eighties. As he grew older, he started doing things, destructive and odd things: ripping my paper models of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in half to make them fit in moving boxes, fatally cutting down plants in the garden after they flowered, handling his money in foolhardy ways. He was still in reasonable possession of his faculties, could drive a car and pay his bills, yet his behavior sometimes seemed ruled by a netherworld of intentions — it was hard to tell whether he did these things to hurt, or because he was at the stage in his life where he didn’t know what he was doing anymore, or something both, or neither. Of the box, the only things left are the few things I unthinkingly set aside for my own purposes: two accounts of anti-social [i.e., anti-sports] behavior at day camp, an essay about a nauseating amusement park ride from 1978, and a second-grade handwriting assignment I d’tourned with a picture of S’ren Kierkegaard that I fear I haven’t seen in a while — it may have gone down with the World Trade Center.)

That’s a fake fireplace, by the way. (My apologies to all you fireplace rockists.) You can see one exactly like it on page 24 of Bill Owens’ Suburbia. A rotating piece of wood, covered in tinsel and illuminated with light bulbs, then covered with a large black and white piece of plastic whose overall shape and texture suggested a rotting carcass just as much as it did burning logs. It gave off little light, a faint grinding sound and no heat. Those are fake plants, too. My brothers and I had a tendency to “water” them by peeing in the pots.

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST Christmas 1974

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST
Christmas 1974

One Christmas (not sure which) I received the General Electric Show ‘N Tell, a filmstrip-viewer/turntable that looked like a bright red television set. One time when I was bored, I remembered my parents had other filmstrips in their closet, and when I finally found ones that could fit into the Show ‘N Tell, I could see pictures of my brothers in formal clothing — but the colors were all wrong and it made everybody look like monsters, so I never did that again.

I scanned this image from a color negative as a place-holder for me to write about before I got the negative developed. Then I lost the negative. Then I found the negative again and decided I liked it better than what it would probably look like developed, with the years of damage (sadly, all our color negatives are that dirty) and the odd color balance, almost like super-vivid afterimages from closing your eyes too hard. The above .jpg still doesn’t really look much like the negative does when I hold it up to a light source — even with the dust and fading, the lines and colors on the negative actually look very well-defined — but a massive amount of fiddling with the saturation and contrast turned this mass of browns and greens into something vaguely recognizable as me, in the den, playing with Tinkertoys. You can even recognize the lump in the hallway as our family dog in sleep mode: the diagonal white strip is her crown, the black triangle to the right her head, the rest is the rest.

I can’t think of much else to say about the above, so this is as good time as any to review the schedule for the typical Daddino family Christmas. To wit:

Stage I. Christmas Stockings. Early morning. The opening of ephemeral Christmas gifts.
Stage II. Intercalary Christmas Moment I: Morning. The adults prepare meals while the kids play with toys.
Stage III. Entertaining: Midday. Small talk, finger food, spiked punch.
Stage IV. Christmas Presents: Afternoon until dusk. The obscene selfishness of bourgeois children.
Stage V. Intercalary Christmas Moment II: Dusk. The kids play with toys while the adults prepare meals.
Stage VI. Dinner and Dessert: Early evening. Lobster or Roast. Cake and espresso.’
Stage VII. The Rosy Afterglow: Evening. People leave, the parents clean up while the kids play with toys.

The “canonical” Daddino Christmases — meaning the ones we all mentally refer to as the Christmases all other Christmases will have to stand or fall (invariably fall) by — follow the above template very very strictly. These stages are all present in their recognizable forms some time before I’m born, when my family stop celebrating Christmas at our relatives’ homes, and die a protracted death throughout the eighties. In 1982, faced with the reality that we’re all too big for coloring books and candy, my mom fills our stockings with office supplies (I got stamp hinges, a hole-punch and a mini-stapler with extra staples, among other things), and faced with that kind of unromantic factualness we all silently concluded that this tradition had become largely redundant and never bothered with Stage I again. Furthermore, as us kids evolved beyond treating Christmas as a toy-based experience and started actually helping out with the festivities rather than squirreling ourselves away with our stuff, Stages II, V and VII begin to lose their distinctiveness.’Finally, by Christmas 1987, my mom, too exhausted from the demands of work to prepare meals, takes us all to the Garden City Hotel for dinner, forcing the system to reach complete collapse even though Stage IV is still present. There is rallying, even peaky highs in subsequent years (XMASY2K comes to mind), but 1987 marks the end of the classic Daddino Christmas era. Yet there is hope the magic can begin again with the grandchildren.

This may be terrible to admit but I really could’ve done without Stage III; as an obstacle to Stage IV, it was INTERMINABLE. I couldn’t understand why my parents couldn’t see the logic of combining Stages III and IV, but Mom insisted on it being something of a formal occasion. Odd, really, since it meant dressing up and making nice small talk with people I already saw every single day.’Oh, and yes, clearly Stage III was put on Earth to heighten the feelings of expectation for Stage IV, as if months and months of waiting had only succeeded in making us completely apathetic about getting more presents than any child will ever deserve. So Stage III largely saw a lot of my pacing, whining and clock-watching. When I got a little older I tried salving the boredom a little by helping my mother with the food, such as preparing a spectacularly failed fondue one year, but eventually I get so fed up with the hours of stilted conversation and aimless wandering around the den that during Christmas 1986 (or maybe ‘85) I don’t even bother coming downstairs, choosing instead to listen to R.E.M.’s Murmur on my stereo verrry closely.

Today’s photo shows me during Stage VII, finally allowed to play with my toys in a moment of peace before I was sent to bed. In contrast to Stage III, Stage VII was sometimes actually and truly full of family feeling. When we were older, we’d just go straight to our rooms, but in Christmas ‘76, we all found ourselves in the den with our parents, staying up very late at night (for us) playing with our toys, playing with each other’s toys, and completely transfixed by the Magnavox Odyssey we got that year…which can’t at all be right since they stopped production on the Odyssey in ‘74. Hmm.

By the way, I forgot to link to this photo in the last post, so enjoy.

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST Christmas 1974

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST
Christmas 1974

1974 appears to be the dividing line between the recognizable and the void in my life. The earliest memory I can attach a date to is Bobby’s birthday in October, and there are memories which must be earlier, like the tail-end of toilet-training, which, going by the averages, would mean spring or summer of that year. There are even ones which seem to predate my ability to talk because they seem oddly silent and closed-in, devoid of any sense of verbal action or thought, but I just don’t know. This Christmas is the first one I can remember. The photos I’ve posted so far are, at best, a bloom of frayed connections between then and now: they show toys I know I played with but probably played with for years, recognizable traditions that were also undertaken at other Christmases, etc. They offer tantalizing maybes. This one has tantalizing yeses. I’m pleased my dad took this photo, because he just as easily could’ve not captured this event; if you asked him that day what, if anything, I might take from this day thirty years down the line, it’d be the opening of the most expensive toy, or…I dunno. It just wouldn’t be this.’But it is this.
‘
The internet tells me that what I’m holding in my hand is the circa-’74 edition of the Ohio Art “Busy Boy” Tool Box. It may or may not be the first toy I played with that day: here it looks like I’m just about to open the box for the first time while I’ve already taken the train off its track, yet in another photo, the train is neatly on its track and the tools are already all over the ground. (If I had the negative strips for those two it’d settle the matter as to which came first, but I’ve got all the negatives for this year’s Xmas photos except for those.) I could deduce from that I found immense pleasure just emptying and refilling the box again and again. This sounds about right because while I remember almost nothing else from this day, I remember playing with it, fixating on it, getting lost in the vinyl smell, which was like the smell of toys and toy stores; the taste of the tools (of course I was going to put them in my mouth) and their tactile profile on my tongue and lips, the saw and its ridges, and the zizzing sound they made going back and forth on my teeth; the blue exterior and and the lime green interior of the tin, the thin tubular hinges, and the intricate little Ohio Art logo on the back of the lid, which obviously had meaning but I wasn’t sure what…and then…and then…in a push-pull moment of consciousness, as if my mind had just received a gentle reboot, everything shifted from dreamy play to real life, and I became newly aware of what was going on around me.

How much of this memory is actually bullshit? I don’t really know. After I wrote the above, I thought it sounded almost like a purple fabulation based on the suggestions of photos I’d seem of the event years after the fact. I always remembered this memory, but I didn’t think about it much until I was able to connect it to this photograph, back when I first organized the family photo collection in 1995. Before then, for some reason I thought I was doing this everything — the teething, the smelling, the zizzing — behind or even to the right of the blue couch, which by the photos seems to be physically impossible. (Unless I was hiding under the side table…) I remember music was playing, but can’t think specifically what, and anyway I’m wondering if I think that only because my parents always played music on Xmas day, and maybe I only believe I chewed on the tools only because I always did that, too. On the one hand, I clearly remembered I was playing with an Ohio Art toy (maybe it stuck out in my mind thanks to a commercial, or exposure to an Etch-a-Sketch?) without any evidence of this fact being visible in the photos — as I said, there are yeses in the photo, but tantalizing yeses.

Likewise with the coming-down-the-stairs memories I mentioned in the last posts. I have two different memories, from two different times, of coming down the stairs and being shocked into exclaiming that it was Christmas. At two-and-a-half, I was a late talker, so these Christmases would have to be Xmas 1973 at the earliest, and — since Christmas 1976 was largely held in the den rather than the living room — 1975 at the latest, so it’s safe to assume these two instances happen in ‘74 and ‘75. But any examination of these memories renders them insubstantial. I cannot actually remember the difference I found between what was there the day before and what was there on Christmas; I cannot even remember if I realized it was Christmas by sensing there were differences, I may just be assuming that. Even the picture-image of coming-down-the-stairs has been corrupted, melting into countless other memories of being in that room. I do remember…or rather, I attached to this memory the notion that it was bright, even sunny outside. I don’t even remember that so much so much as the way light from the outside reflected back into the living room. Photos from these Christmases don’t really show a sunny day at all. I sort of see myself in the memory, in pajamas and throwing my hands up but of course I couldn’t see myself. Is that all these memories consist of, a few facts and a cast of supporting suppositions? It’s as if the little QuickTime videos in my head that once constituted The Memory of That Thing dried up, what were left were sentences and a few blocky jpgs. (A LOT LIKE THIS BLOG.) What I remember is a story that I told myself — when I talk about “this memory” certain images and phrases that have attached themselves to it, perhaps meaningfully, perhaps not.

The only other thing I remember is that this may have also been the Christmas Uncle John explained to me what Gouda cheese was.

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST Christmas 1973

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST
Christmas 1973

L-R: Me(?); Nanny, Grandpa, Mom

This time you can click on the pic to get a higher-res image, not that it’ll do much good here. Save for the Santa pic, all of the earlier pictures were scanned from new prints made from fairly pristine 35mm slides, but our family stopped getting pictures developed into slides early in ‘74, and the negatives I have of everything else (when I have them) are pretty iffy. So, from now on, everything I post will be scanned from prints developed a week to a few months after the photos were taken. These photos are all victims, more or less, of aging and the stupid technological fads of the day. This photo, for example, lost a noticeable amount of blue since early 1974 (my parents were terrible slackers when it came to getting things developed) so I had to do a lot of Paint Shop Pro color-correction to restore some of the original vividness. The photo is also the first of many Christmas shots developed on this awful textured paper that, while preventing smudgy fingerprints totally retards image resolution. And when they get scanned, they throw off little pinpricks of reflected light, often making fields of dark color look positively starry. Later you’ll also see the Polaroids, which looked like shit right out of the camera, and the less said about Kodak Disc film the better. So my apologies in advance.

I can’t blame Fotomat for this photo, though — yeah, that’s how it’s supposed to look. Why this photo is so crazily off-center, I don’t know. My grandmother is clutching a red something-or-other that should’ve been the center of the photo: it could actually be me standing on the table, as there’s a little hand by her neck and I’m wearing crimson overalls in other shots from that day.’There’s no accident in it, no blurring from movement, and it’s vertically centered, too, so I’m tempted to say it’s deliberate. Unless Tommy took this photo and was being a brat (not likely), I’m guessing my father was probably caught in a moment of irrational contrariness, brought about by being as exhausted as my mom looks, as she gives off the kind of smile indistinguishable from amphetamined teeth-grinding. (She looks moderately insane here.) For a number of years, this one included, my parents would stay up all night quietly frosting the Christmas cake by adding to an already Christmassed-out house, arranging the stocking displays and assembling toys, and wrapping more presents for the tree (the idea being that the new presents that magically appeared on Christmas day — as opposed to the ones that had been slowly been massing under the tree all month — were Santa’s additions) That kind of fussing around was of course in the service of major Christmas-memory-creation for me and my brothers, and believe me, the payoff was enormous. I have two clarion-call memories (probably from 1974 and 1975) of waking early, going down the stairs, just as I did nearly every single day, then surveying a radically changed scene and being so overwhelmed with surprise that it was Christmas, Christmas was TODAY, I screamed in delight and surprise thereby waking up my brothers and my parents, who maybe had two hours of sleep.

To the right, you can see fragments of the family’s photographic legacy, including several Christmas shots. (A Christmas meta-picture.) The topmost one is of the infant Bobby in a Christmas photo with well-nigh iconic status at the Daddino household: him peeking through the metal guard railings and fake plastic Holly garlands on the second-floor hallway (and I forgot to scan that, sorry). Underneath are pendant-shaped frames, one of which has four mall-Santa shots, including the two I’ve already shown. Imagine having to look at those photos every single day when you’re a small child: your parents choose to highlight pictures of what they think are you at your cutest, and that’s you getting all neurotic on Santa’s lap. The big blue thing: that’s a plaque with the’”snips and snails and puppy dog tails” quote which still hangs in my mom’s house in a light-filled room largely dedicated to my brother’s children when they visit. Also, out of view, a picture of a tiny Tommy outside of my parents’ first house, and a Hallmark (or American Greetings) plaque with Snoopy on the doghouse saying some appropriately cute thing.

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST Christmas 1973

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST
Christmas 1973

L-R: Tommy, Bobby

It’s a pretty safe bet that everything you see in this photo is probably in a landfill somewhere.’

OK, now that I’ve gotten the sweeping statement out of the way, it’s fun to quantify (and qualify) the fates of our possessions as they sailed off towards eternity like the souls at the end of Herman Broch’s The Death of Virgil. Almost all of the toys were destroyed or given away within a few years — while I can’t speak for my brother’s toys, by my estimates, the inch-worm (upper left-hand corner) wins the 1973 toy longevity game. I’ve got a clear recollection of trying to play with it during the Bicentennial party two-and-a-half years later, then watching snow fall on it in the yard one night, probably during the next winter, where I imagine it stayed until it was thrown out, water- damaged and insecty. The all-time oldest toy of mine I have any trace of: the Fisher-Price Play Family Castle (it seems appropriate to italicize it, like it was a work of art). I sold it off for mere dimes in a garage sale in 1977, 1978 or so; sometime before the family quit the North Bellmore house for good in 1992, I ran my fingers underneath the radiators in my room and found this little survivor. I also own the family’s Atari cartridges from ‘78-’83 and a Woodstock doll with a gnawed arm that I should take to the New York Doll Hospital one day, to say nothing of the LEGO sets I still have. There was a very odd Christmas special back in ‘78 or so where a magician or a scientist (what’s the diff in these things?) misguidedly tried to encase all the world’s toys in Lucite cubes so that kids can have them around forever and ever. Raggedy Ann & Andy would have none of that, leading us to the Heartwarming Lesson: the whole point of a toy is to love it — in other, more Marxian words, to use it up and then buy another one. (Bet it was sponsored by Toys “R” Us.) The Lucite option actually sounded pretty attractive to me, as I never liked how my attentions would make toys increasingly crippled, yes crippled, as I was an animist at heart and treated almost everything around me as having some kind of soul that I had some responsibility for. Surfaces scratched, pieces lost, the dog ate the New York puzzle piece again, BAD GIRL: these were little injuries and deaths. The not-so-faint traces of that attitude later inform my understanding of economics and ecology, teaching me you don’t waste stuff. Toys that lost their usefulness would not get completely discarded, instead they’d “go to charity” — that is, get thrown into these large dumpster-like metal boxes you’d see in suburban parking lots, set up by a local Catholic church usually, thereby postponing the landfill-fate for at least a few more years. Unless my grandfather simply ditched them in a dumpster somewhere, which I wouldn’t hold past him.’Right after I got rid of most of my early toys this way it occurred to me that there was still something perverse and wasteful about sloughing off the old only to make room for new in endless cycles, and, perhaps not coincidentally, the spell of toys had over my imagination started breaking.’

Anyway…the carpet and wallpaper disappear by the late eighties; the furniture gets thrown out once we leave North Bellmore. The glass credenzas (upper-right corner), after spending some time in my apartment, are now in an unloved corner of my mom’s basement; the green glass globe (also upper-right corner) is also in the basement; the glass ash-tray (on the side table) is…somewhere, while the porcelain bowl with a lid is in privileged space in keepsake cabinet. The boys are still around, if irretrievably grown-up. The house itself still stands, now occupied by another family.

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST Christmas 1972

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST
Christmas 1972

L-R: Bobby, Dad

Dad is thirty-two here, a year younger than I am now, yet eternally a leap ahead of me. However old I get, I will always look at this photo and see someone my senior. Other photos, from his teen years or early twenties, don’t have this problem. He seems young there. But then he seems like someone else entirely. The first time I saw a picture of him from his early twenties I burst out with “he looks like Ricky Ricardo!” Now this was when I was maybe six or seven and still pretty naive about the markers of ethnicity; still, not entirely ridiculous, as the Daddinos trace their bloodlines not just through Italy but Morocco and Brazil (though not Cuba, far as I know). But in slightly later photos, when he starts losing the callowness in his face — when he starts looking like the man who raised me — he may be twenty-five or thirty, the same age as any random Williamsburgher dork on Friendster, yet completely incommensurable with them in terms of…a lot.

In light of this time dilation, it’s ironic that he’s sharing with my brother one of the childhood passions that lingered all the way through his adulthood: model trains. We bonded, in our way, over them. As a very young child he’d tote me along, spending many longueurs (meaning maybe only an efficient ten minutes a time, still very boring for a child) in the number of the hobby stores on the Island; while I have only one clear memory of going with him to Trainland, a specialty store in Lynbrook, every time I passed by it while commuting on the Long Island Rail Road, I’d think of that moment, very brief but full of light (was a sunny day). One time the family went to a train show somewhere on Long Island: the only thing I remember was the charging sound of trains that seemed to come from everywhere yet nowhere yet behind a very large curtain yet um maybe not. He’d often spend his weekend in the den or butcher-block kitchen table, quietly assembling wooden train cars via x-acto knife and mitre box, balsa wood and a Diet Pepsi to the side. I never thought it odd that an adult took toys seriously, which is possibly a root reason why I still have dozens of old LEGO sets from the eighties…and it never occurred to me until just now that Dad and I shared a passion for lording over miniature worlds, systems you could enclose in a wide hug, smaller versions of larger things. Mine: LEGO sets, Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, Fisher-Price play-sets, dolls and dollhouses, maps, models esp. Visible Mans and Womens, Build Your Own Books, my own electric set, at five and a half…

Also, photography (the “smaller versions of larger things” thing, again). Dad gave me my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, around 1981, a completely spur of the moment gift (which at the time was completely unlike him). He was the family photographer, more likely to be behind the camera than in front of it. Some fragmentary evidence: out of the over nine hundred 35mm slides our family had developed from 1970 to 1974, my dad appears in less than five of them; of our Christmas photos from 1982 and 1983, the last two Christmases prior to the divorce, he isn’t even in a single shot.’So photos of him are hen’s teeth rare. But the lion’s share of the pictures you’ll see this month are his.’

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST
Christmas 1972

L-R: Nanny, Mom, Uncle John

Nanny wasn’t anyone’s nanny but my maternal grandmother; likewise, Uncle John was my maternal great-uncle. Grandpa (maternal grandfather) and Aunt Millie (maternal great-aunt) you’ll see later. Collectively, my stepdad called them (not unfondly) “the old folks.”

They had a powerful sense of attachment. Both couples lived in the same Brooklyn house for years; later, not long after my parents moved out to Long Island, they moved, too — only a mile away from us in a nice little two-story apartment complex, and again, right next door to each other. (Later my paternal grandmother would move to the same apartment complex only a few doors down.) Subsequently, they were always around us. Always. Nanny and Millie took care of the family wash, Grandpa and Uncle John would do manly odd jobs around the house, and and all of them picking up some of the loose ends of household management and child-rearing: feeding, shopping, transport, amusement, protection, dotage. Or they would just, you know, “hang out” and read the paper, have a cup of tea, watch the stock market returns on our cable TV, and so on. Friends sometimes cluck in envy that, unlike their own family members who’ve passed away early, leaving only a sad vague trace of remembrance and some old photos (if that), I knew my grandparents. (In comparison, my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born, is as much of a cipher as most of my other relatives.) The other side of the coin…well, the kind way of putting it is that they often drove the family crazy in a kind of Everybody Loves Raymond sort of way.

Anyway…what is my mom laughing at? It’s not clear from the photo, and the ones before and after don’t reveal anything. (Such an odd-looking laugh, too, with the arms and hands so delicately out-stretched, suggesting an over-rationalized response.) I’ve asked her and she doesn’t remember. She thinks she might be reacting to me or my brothers opening a gift, and if that’s the case, it sure would’ve been nice to see exactly what (there are not nearly enough pictures of toys in our collection, which shows you where my priorities are). The switch in photography from flash-powder formality to point-and-click immediacy has encouraged a much more casual relationship between the frontal lobe and the trigger finger; consequently, in any Western family’s photo library there is always a healthy percentage of photos like this which are completely inexplicable to anyone involved. Why this reaction? Why this gift and not that one? Why then and not a little later? Why the food and the immaculate set table and not that expensive toy? Why? Why? Why? Nobody can remember. We get to experience the echo but not the actual gunshot. (And yet a photo is itself an echo.) But we do get my mom’s crazy-ass patchwork maxiskirt (Which she still has! Which by all rights oughta be on someone’s waist in My Comrade’s next issue!) and a really blank wall which seems to hover over the three like existential doom.

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST Christmas 1972

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST
Christmas 1972

L-R: Bobby, me.

Weeks of preparation. Several hundred dollars spent on presents. Two hours of sleep. And after all that fussing towards perfection, you get what every parent wants to see on Christmas day: a son more interested in playing with his younger brother’s toys rather than opening more of his own. (See those blue boxes on Bobby’s sleeping bag? Un-unwrapped.)

Thankfully the younger kid prefers playing with the Christmas ornaments to fighting with his brother.

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST
Christmas 1972

Bobby looks very solemn with his Snoopy pajamas and Bicentennial kitsch drum, but sooner rather than later that drum’s gonna a receive a whack too hard and off to the trash it goes. Not that I blame him any — I mean, what good is a drum to a child if he can’t thrash it, right? I salute my parents for selflessly feeding us rock-ish instruments again and again, with the final upshot, after many formative years of clangs and bangs and disembowelingly huge bass sounds, being 1) a son who spent some years drumming on a professional basis 2) another son who spent some years DJing weddings and parties on a professional basis 3) yet another son who reviews records on a semi-professional basis. (Go me.)

Mom has clear memories of Jerry Lee Lewis playing the Brooklyn Paramount; the really shocking thing to her was not the sex & religion thing but seeing him DISRESPECT the piano. Growing up, pianos were not to be toyed with, they were expensive and your key to mobility up and out of Brooklyn. But (I’m supposing) the family was already out of Brooklyn anyway. The family ended up largely avoiding “proper” instruments, maybe thanks to my parents obnoxious recollections of endless piano lessons: some family photos show an upright piano in this room that disappears prior to my existence and I even wanted to learn the violin at elementary school but I vaguely recall my parents discouraging it.

Also, you can’t really see it but right next to Bert is a card or a box (hard to tell) with a flag on the moon and an astronaut waving hello; the final American lunar landing was only days before, and God, what a waste of time that all seems now. I also salute my parents for feeding us with mild patriotism, though the good that did us has been largely fuck-all.

Here my parents first employ a trick of placing “stocking stuffers” (gifts not really significant enough to be wrapped) on large patterned sleeping bags, giving the illusion that the floor is covered with more stuff there’s more than there really is, which is still quite a lot of stuff. And this isn’t even Christmas proper yet — the unwrapping of the REAL presents, following tradition, would be much later in the afternoon.

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST

THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST
December 1972

L-R: Tommy, me, Santa Claus, Bobby.’

You may have already laughed at the family’s next (and, unsurprisingly, last) mall Santa photo.

Man, what happened to my beautiful blonde hair? Who the hell do I have to fuck to get hair that Beach Boy-esque, that glinty gold again? More urgently, just what is THE DEAL with me and Santa? Rooting around my memories makes me think my SANTACLAUSTROPHOBIA touched on many of my all-time favorite neuroses (guilt, sexuality, parents), making the subject a rich mine for navel-gazing, but given that we’re dealing with the psychological dead-zone of infantile amnesia, anything explanation would have a serious lack of provability. Though to indulge in the armchair therapy just a smidge, it’s telling that very similar reactions towards overbearing or condescending adults (parents included), or “famous people” (meaning people dressed as cartoon characters rather than Elton John or Richard Nixon) are vivid memories from a slightly later time.

On the hand, it may be a simpler matter of the fucked-up-ed-ness of being plopped onto the lap of a strange old man in front of very bright lights (probably the reason why I’m shielding my eyes in the second photo). Meanwhile, both my brothers are totally unflappable about the big dude in red, damn their fearlessness.