And I was taken back …
Christmas 1964, maybe it was. We lived in the house at the bottom of the hill on the Ogbomoso station so that places this memory in either 1963 or 1964 but since I remember it so clearly, I will go with 1964 when I was six instead of the year before when I was only five. That year, I got the grandest of presents!
I was used to getting one gift from Santa and maybe a couple more wrapped under the tree. The wrapped gifts usually came from my family's trip to the Kingsway store in Ibadan so I sometimes had at least an idea of what those gifts might be. But the gift from Santa was usually only one gift (often a baby doll or stuffed animal) that sat unwrapped on a couch next to a stocking filled with candy and small toys. That gift, I now know was often purchased ahead while my parents were in the US and carefully brought to Nigeria in the packed barrels. But that year …
On that Christmas morning, my gift, or rather our gifts because they were joint gifts to my two sisters and me, were spread out all over the living room. The room was filled to the brim with new things for us! And what were these abundant gifts?
My father, with the help of the hospital carpenter, had built out of lightweight wood, plywood perhaps, a toy refrigerator, stove / oven, and mini kitchen cabinet. My parents had brought a set of plastic dishes with them from the US and those were laid out--dishes, silverware, and pots and pans. To top it off, my mother has sewn mini dishtowels, pot holders, and aprons for us.
My childhood eyes burst with amazement as I scanned the room and then walked all around it looking from one thing to another. Later when we had this all set up in our shared bedroom with our dolls that we already owned, sitting in little chairs in this play kitchen, I felt like I lived in a playland of my very own!
