Christmas starts with a train-like rumble as my shoes clatter across a certain metal freight door built into the sidewalk in front of George Dean's Menswear on Clayton Street. This nostalgic sound from childhood always takes me back to Christmas in Athens, circa 1959.
It was the year of Chatty Cathy. Like many girls of the baby boom generation, I met Mattel's new talking doll in TV commercials blinking across a black and white screen. Chatty Cathy featured a pull-string at the back of her neck that activated a built-in 3-inch vinyl turntable/record in her stomach. Her vocabulary included 11 classic phrases like, "Will you play with me?" and "Tell me a story."
Chatty Cathy was at the top of my Christmas list one chilly November day in 1959 as I walked across the sidewalk metal freight door on Clayton Street with my mother and grandmother. We were down town to check out this new doll in person at McLellan's (now Barberitos and Angelo's Italian Restaurant) and Woolworth's (now Genco Import Co. and Masada Leather and Outdoor). I quickly selected a brunette Chatty Cathy with brown eyes like mine and, back home on Indiana Avenue, I composed a letter to Santa Claus.
In the Athens of my childhood -- a small Southern town located within a county of about 45,000 -- local salesman Jack Martin was Santa Claus. During a Christmas season which didn't start until the day after Thanksgiving, hundreds of children in Athens and surrounding areas wrote to Santa, then tuned in to local radio station WRFC to listen to this jovial southern Kriss Kringle read their letters on the air.
Jack's radio show reververated with jolly ho-ho-ho's and frequent references to "sugar tits" (a folk name for a baby pacifier made from sugar in a cloth, a precursor to the plastic pacifier of today). My favorite Jack Martin saying was his reference to the slice of cake he expected each child to leave for Santa on Christmas Eve. "Coconut cake with the juice oozing from layer to layer," he'd drawl in between references to chitlins and red-eye gravy and little boys and girls "being good" so Santa wouldn't leave them a bundle of switches.
Visiting this local Santa in downtown stores such as Belks (Hilton Garden Inn) was even more thrilling than hearing him read my letter on the radio. He had an unforgettable Santa voice and looked so much like the man from the north pole that area children were convinced he was the real thing. But the ultimate Santa performance always came at the annual Christmas parade, usually held the first Thursday night after Thanksgiving.
Some Athenians recall downtown Christmas parades as far back as 1947. The parade we see today was first organized in the early '70s. Believe it or not, our Athens parade, now sponsored by Athens-Clarke County Leisure Services, is one of the last remaining nighttime Christmas parades in Georgia.
On parade night in 1959, Athenians of all ages crowded the sidewalks of Clayton and nearby streets, admiring the Davison's department store (Michael Building) automatons gesturing from their spot above the double doors, and the fat, brightly colored decorations that snaked along treeless sidewalks. At the same time we strained our freezing ears to catch the first boom-boom of drums that signaled the arrival of a magical conglomeration of colorful floats, marching bands and majorettes in flittering costumes, twirling silver batons.
The highlight of the parade came at the very end, when Santa's float motored by with the jolly Athenian St. Nick, Jack Martin, waving and shouting his famous ho-ho-ho's into the chilly night air. One look from Jack and I knew that my doll was already packed in his bag, loaded for the frosty sleigh ride to Athens on Christmas Eve.
On Christmas morning 1959, Chatty Cathy greeted me from her spot under the fragrant cedar tree decorated with multicolored bubble lights and shimmering tinsel. "Play with me," she said before her little record player voice box started talking gibberish, as so many of those early Chatty Cathy dolls did.
Like many Athenians, as another Christmas approaches, I find myself missing family and friends who are no longer here to enjoy the parade. At the same time, I could never go back to the days before computers and Internet, when Chatty Cathy was cutting-edge technology worthy of a number one spot on a little girl's letter to Santa, delivered of course by snail-mail. Chatty would have a hard time competing with T.M.X. Elmo, or better yet a sleek new iPod, in today's modern world.
Still, whenever I walk across a certain sidewalk freight door on Clayton Street, that familiar rumble reminds me of an Athens Christmas, circa 1959. And on crisp December days, it gives me something to chat about with Cathy, the only doll I kept from childhood.
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This Christmas essay appeared in the December 2006 issue of Athens Magazine. Copyright December 2006. No reprints without permission.
