Reed Ide

It was my kindergarten year. The “schoolroom” was right around the corner from where my dad worked. I would ride with him, and be dropped early, with time to amuse myself. I played alone with the various toys, chief among them a dinging, raucous Ferris wheel.

Some 67 years later I can still hear my mother’s voice. “Santa won’t bring a toy that foolish,” she said to me in our kitchen one December afternoon. I was a five-year-old boy, dictating my annual wish-list to Santa. Mom had very definite ideas about what Santa would not tolerate. Chief among the intolerables was the wind-up toy Ferris wheel I so desired.

Mom remained adamant. Santa liked toys that would engage children in activity. That Ferris wheel? Too passive – nothing to do but wind it up and watch it spin. Socks and underwear, always plentiful at Christmas, loomed large on my holiday horizon. Still, the Ferris wheel went into the letter that mom wrote from her notes. I scrawled some semblance of my name at the bottom, and off it went to the North Pole.

Christmas arrived. Yes, there were socks and underwear. There was a green and black shirt I insisted on wearing immediately, A beanstalk-growing kit that even Jack would have been afraid to climb was under the tree. Finally, just one box from Santa remained. My name was on it. Inside? That wonderful, raucous Ferris wheel – colorful, noisy, ridiculously useless. Gone now, but always spinning merrily in memory.