Christmas Is All Around Us

Tonight, as I was sorting through some of my things and cleaning out junk from my room, I came across a series of my earliest childhood memories that I wrote out for a school project years ago. One of the funnier ones involves my earliest attempts at entrepreneurship…

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         As a young child, a major endeavor of mine was to acquire money with which to buy candy. I had no use for money besides this, but without my own money I was not likely to get the amount of candy I desired. So, I took to selling lemonade. This would have been a good idea, except that there were few cars that passed our house out in the country on any given day. But, I was determined, so I would sit on the stone steps, behind a little table, selling cups of hot lemonade that had been sitting out in the boiling sun. My siblings were my best customers, though a few of the neighbors would also stop to purchase a steaming cup or two. More often I would sit on the stone wall watching the spider mites and waiting for my next victim.

When the neighborhood tired of lemonade, I thought up new get-rich-quick schemes. I designed greeting cards and postcards, selling them for a nickel apiece. I set up shop on the living room chairs, and worked on my merchandise as I waited for anyone to come by to buy something. I didn’t make a lot of money, but it was enough to buy a few pieces of candy. That was all I needed.

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Another early ambition of mine—bunny wrangling…

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        Around our house lived dozens of wild bunnies. I would see them out in the field, munching on clover in little groups. I very much wanted to catch a bunny, and I would try to sneak up on them, milk crate in hand. Of course, as soon as I came anywhere near them they would scatter, but I always felt that I had come so close, and so I would keep on trying. When that didn’t work, I set up a trap in our spacious backyard. I used an overturned box propped up with a stick. The stick was tied with a long string that I would hold in anticipation as I hid behind a bicycle propped up in the yard several feet away. I dreamed of the moment when a bunny would come along and decide to crawl under the box. My plan never worked.

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Youth was never a simple thing for me. I had the ideas and the drive, but neither the skills or the knowledge to figure out how to accomplish what I wanted. Perhaps things aren’t so different for me now—except that I can’t spend all my hard earned money on candy.