The Big Red Box: A Christmas Story

Early, this Sunday evening, I walked down the street to meet my daughter at the neighbor’s. With Christmas only two weeks away, she’d been making gingerbread houses the better part of the day.

My arms and shoulders ached from raking leaves in the cold mid-December afternoon wind. The same stiff and frigid breeze still blew as together my daughter and I walked side by side. We made small talk as we returned in the waning daylight.

In her arms, tucked carefully against the front of her blue coat with pink stripes and matching hood, she held a delicate gingerbread house thoughtfully placed by her playmate’s mother inside a paper bag turned sidewise. This holiday craft was the reward of hours of patience and perseverance, two qualities hard to master regardless of age, but especially so when tempted and tantalized by warm, fresh-from-the-oven cookies topped with cool sweet white icing, not too mention piles of red licorice twists and potent mint green gumdrops.

These candies were among those my daughter and neighbor friends employed in building their edible holiday homes. As my daughter stole a peak inside the paper bag, it hit me. Right there, on the bleached gray and cold concrete sidewalk looking over my neighbors' spent trees and red, gray and tan brick homes, I experienced a full-on nostalgic reminiscence.

I have my own Christmas baking memories. Most all of them center around a big red box my mother faithfully stored year-round with the rest of the holiday decorations in our basement.

Maybe two feet wide by twelve inches deep, and but three inches or so tall, the solidly constructed rectangular box held a treasury of glass bottles. They don’t make boxes like that any more, the way they did in the fifties, which is when I’m guessing this kit was produced.

Inside, each four-inch tall glass bottle with removable glass rubber-sealed topper, possessed its own storage bay. They were accessed by lifting the wedding-gift quality lid. You simply pulled it straight up. Then there, inside, were a dozen different colored and flavored confections.

All colors of the rainbow were present, from deep blue sprinkles to cherry red sparkles. My favorite were the verboten silver BBs, which I always tried to sneak but was inevitably discovered mid crunch, then warned I’d crack a filling.

I ate them anyway. I distinctly remember worrying we’d consume all our supply. Then, where would we possibly find suitable replacements?

With John Denver Christmas carols playing on the family’s eight-track stereo, a crackling fire in the fireplace and more likely than not cold Lake Erie winds blowing snow outside the windows, those were the issues that worried me in 1975. Little did I know my interest in baking Christmas cookies would fade so soon, or that my fascination with the big red box and its colorful, flavorful candies would so quickly fall by the wayside, replaced instead with thoughts of girls, cars, internships and, someday later, a career, marriage, children of my own and then the closing of my parents’ estates.

But back in my childhood home, Christmas wasn’t Christmas until the sugar cookie dough was kneaded, the cut out forms in the shape of snowmen, Santa and the like retrieved from the old coffee can in which they were stored and these, the magical ingredients necessary for topping off the white icing, released from the grandeur that was the big red box.