My Grandpap told me that from the time he could first remember, his Christmas presents always consisted of three or four oranges, a sack of hard candy and maybe a homemade toy. He said he was always "plumb tickled" with these presents, because Christmas was the only time there were ever any oranges in the house and almost the only time he ever got any store-bought candy.

The year that Grandpap turned seven, the family got up on Christmas morning, opened their usual presents, then sat down to eat breakfast. The two-room log cabin they lived in had a rail fence around it, and after they had finished eating Grandpap's Dad told him, "Ed, you ought to go out and look around the fence. Old Santa might have dropped something out of his sack while he was climbing over."

Grandpap went out to check and found a beautiful metal horse, about eight inches tall, laying by the fence. It was the first toy he had ever owned that wasn't homemade, and he thought it was the most wonderful thing he had ever seen.

Grandpap played with his horse every chance he got, and he told me, "Cap, the more I played with it the more I got to wondering if my horse had insides, like a real horse." After a couple of weeks, curiosity finally got the better of him, so he took his horse to the barn, got a hammer and chisel and opened it up to find out.

"Cap," he said, "the blamed thing was plumb empty, and we never did get my horse where it would stay together again."

Grandpap told me this story one afternoon when he found me in the old buggy house, diligently working on splitting open a toy John Deere tractor with a hammer and chisel. I wanted to see what the engine looked like on the inside.

I guess times change, but kids pretty much stay the same. Merry Christmas!