December 25, 1952. I was three years old.
A toy like this was under the tree:
It was a wonderful gift.
Other boys my age were getting tricycles. Tricycles could go faster but they were designed to go on sidewalks and on the concrete floors of one-car garages that were being built in tract houses in postwar America. I didn't want to be fast. I wanted to be strong, like grownups who drove tractors in the fields around me.
My pedal tractor had thick tread on the rear wheels. It could push through soft mud at the bottom of puddles in the dirt after a rain. That is something one learns about by doing. The dirt next to a puddle would be firm, but the dirt under a puddle might be soft. I sought out mud puddles. You don't really know how soft that mud is until you go into the puddle. Sometimes you got fooled and the tread of the rear tires pushed against soupy mud. The more you pedaled, the deeper you scooped out the mud under the tires. You got stuck. That was good information for a three-year-old to learn.
The tractor was play for me, but I learned something useful about mud, about calculating risk when looking at puddles, and about consequences. Sometimes I would need my cousin to help me pull the tractor out of the mud. It was good to have a friend and neighbor. Our pants, shoes, and socks would get muddy, so we got more lessons about consequences when our mothers saw our clothes.
I have grown-up John Deere tractors now. Every year or so I still get stuck in mud when I try to mow cattails and blackberries along ditch lines. The ground looks firm and dry on top, but just underneath it is soggy. If you get too close to the ditch all of a sudden you realize the tractor tires are in soft mud and are digging a hole. You are stuck. You need a neighbor, another tractor, and a chain to pull you out.
The tractor in the photo is a restored version of the 1950s tractors that John Deere licensed. It is exactly what I remember. More recent models have all sorts of plastic parts, but this one is all metal except for the tires. It is available for $1,250, plus $200 shipping. I could own this again. I am not going to do it.
Another gift my parents gave me was the experience of cleaning up after their deaths. Each of them had stuff they used every day--mostly clothes--that we took to Goodwill. That was easy. The hard part was the keepsake items, the things that were their sentimental memories, things we found up on high shelves or in storage boxes. Those keepsakes had done their job for them. Most were meaningless to us.
I could buy the tractor and hope someday that a grandchild wanted to play with it, but realistically it is just a keepsake, a thing that triggers a pleasant memory. It would be another thing underfoot now, then a future nuisance for someone to deal with. I don't need more things. I need fewer things.
The keepsake is my memory. I have a pleasant memory of the shiny tractor on that Christmas morning whenever my tractor gets stuck in soft mud in cattails next to a ditch.
REQUEST: I would welcome reader comments about special Christmas gifts or Christmas memories that readers might share. Write them as a comment or send them to me to work up into a guest post: peter.w.sage@gmail.com
Very funny, John Rachor. But it was a useful challenge, and knowing how to back up a trailer is a lifelong very valuable skill. Good for him for that response. I spent an hour attempting to back up a trailer with a car I was just learning to drive, at age 15. It had a stick shift. I needed to back it about 100 feet on a narrow path and into a narrow slot. It took me the hour, but by the end I had made some progress in learning that skill. It got much easier the next day, and the day after.. It was a then-30 year old Nash Rambler, probably about a 1935 or so. The gears were so sloppy that one barely needed to depress the clutch.
I never had one of those toy tractors but a few years later I would be mowing hay with a real John Deere B tractor; you started it not with a crank but rotating that fly wheel on the side as hard as possible. Today I keep the front loader "bucket" on the tractor when doing field work as it can help you get unstuck and here in SE Ohio the mud is very sticky sometimes I have to lift the wheels and place wooden fence posts or heavy boards under iin order to extricate myself. I miss the nice loam sandy soils of Nebraska