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Be grateful for presents from the past Tom Mooney Remember When

Sunday December 06, 2009 | 12:00 AM

What’s that you say? You just can’t get into the spirit of the Christmas season? Too many bills? Tired of fighting crowds? Worst of all, the stores keep selling out of the gadgets you want?

Maybe you should have lived 67 years ago, in December of 1942. A little thing called World War II was going on, and homefront America was beginning to feel pain — real honest-to-goodness pain.

No, I don’t personally remember it. I was only a couple of months old at the time. But over the few years after my parents’ talk of food rationing, blackouts and desperate battles began to register. So did the sight of young men, in uniform, with limbs missing, mingling with downtown shoppers.

Let’s take a few minutes away from grousing because we didn’t get there in time for the 60-inch flat screen TV on Black Friday and hop into our time machine for a visit to a Christmas past — 1942.

The looks on people’s faces are pretty grim, aren’t they? That’s because in the year since the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor they’ve overrun the Philippines and most of the western Pacific. Germany controls Europe, with only Britain still holding out — and not by much.

In other words, it’s a war we could lose to those nightmarish warlords, the Nazis and the Japanese. Kind of takes the edge off Christmas, doesn’t it?

We’ll have to use the streetcar or trackless trolley to get around in 1942. Gasoline rationing has just kicked in, and unless you’re in some special category, you have to make do with about three gallons a week. Actually that might be more than enough for our needs, since tires are nearly impossible to get and nobody’s manufacturing civilian automobiles anymore.

The stores look festive enough. But if we’re going to spend money, probably we should buy war bonds. Everybody else is passing up the new phonograph and radio to help our guys and girls in uniform.

Say, isn’t that your grandmother over there? Bet you didn’t realize she was once a young mom. We’ll follow her home. Looks like she just finished her job, probably something defense-related. Granddad is in the service, of course.

She’s planning the week’s meals. That’s not an easy task, since food rationing is starting up. By next year, she has read, it will be even tougher to get meat, sugar, cooking oil and a host of other basic items. Special wartime recipes in her daily copy of the Times Leader will help her stretch limited foodstuffs. She’ll have to carefully juggle the ration coupons she’s been issued to get every last scrap of food she’s been authorized.

The kids are in school, where instead of going on a field trip they’re rounding up all kinds of unused pieces of metal during a scrap drive. The metal will end up as tanks or planes — real ones, not toys for under the tree.

Still, grandmom is lucky. She doesn’t know where her husband is serving, but at least gets heavily censored letters from him. One of the neighbors — her friend — came home recently to a War Department telegram in the mailbox. The first line contained “regret to inform you...”

No, it’s not much of a Christmas, this 1942.

Ready to go back home, pardner?

Maybe you didn’t find your humongous TV, but a whole lot of people have made sure you’ve got something much better. Now there’s a gift to brighten any season.