Our regional shopping mall here in Bellingham, Washington, dating from the late 1980s, recently had a grand re-opening showing off its multi-hundred thousand dollar face lift.

I didn’t attend. I’ve got nothing against shopping malls. It’s just that I can’t stand them. I’m glad I grew up in a time when the acres of asphalt and lookalike big box buildings–spreading over former farm fields–weren’t the main association with Christmas. That, and all the flimsy junk on sale inside, passing as gifts for kids and necessities of modern life.

Not so long ago, Christmas commercial activity was still more about Main Streets in towns and cities. Like many such places, our own “downtown” in Northeast New Jersey had taken nearly three centuries to evolve. True, by the early 1950s, these districts had absorbed the trappings of a commercialized, electrified post-war modern Christmas season. Housewares and toys featured in the Five and Ten’s and the hardware stores included items made of plastic. Elaborate “plug-in” games were marketed for the kids. But to kids, and I suspect to many adults, the garlanded light strings stretching crosswise over street and sidewalk in patterns of stars and bells, the decorated stores offering warm refuge from the late-afternoon winter chill, still heralded a magical season. Even the canned carols coming from loudspeakers added to the spell. Back then people weren’t so self conscious about locally-assembled hokeyness.

Pennsylvania Railroad electric trains, used in New Jersey suburban service from 1914 till early 1970s

But we also had the less-homespun grandness of Christmastime New York City. Our yearly family sojourn started out right, with a half-hour train ride in the well-heated, well-worn confines of a Pennsylvania Railroad local. Nose pressed against the pane provided a procession of normally prosaic urban, industrial, and often-shabby residential scenes turned exotic when viewed from a train window. I pitied the deprived souls out there riding in automobiles and buses.

Penn Station Concourse

Next came the fitting entrance to arguably the world’s greatest city when, after passing under rocky Bergen Hill and the bottom muck of the Hudson, safe in a decades-old tunnel, we de-trained at a high-level platform and ascended the stairs from subterranean track level into the soaring glass-and-steel concourse of Penn Station.

Main Waiting Room, Penn Station

Timelessness hovered over the scurrying crowds. A bank of automatically opening doors led into the mall-like arcade, then into the granite halls of the waiting room, modeled after the Roman Baths of Caracalla. Years of grime–by then the pink granite was washed only up to eight feet above the floor–couldn’t totally diminish the grandeur of  vaulted ceilings and lofty, sunlight-filtering lunette windows . Stepping out through the Corinthian columns onto 7th Avenue was almost a letdown. But the Statler Hotel tree, the parade of animation at Macy’s window, didn’t disappoint. Rockefeller Center and the Radio City Music Hall Christmas girded us with enough seasonal cheer and warmth to face the walk back down Fifth Avenue through the biting chill of New York City’s  windy street-canyons.

Norwegian Pine Christmas Tree, Rockefeller Center

Darkness had fallen on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, as we headed home, again cozily ensconced in a rattletrap train. Darkness dimmed, but failed to obscure, the landscape of cattail marshes, rail yards and buildings of grimy industrial brick. Man-made light was everywhere. Past Newark, the lofty neon toy soldier–standing guard over America’s foremost zipper manufacturer–and the neighboring Pabst Blue Ribbon icon would have obliterated the Star of Bethlehem. Seasonal lights festooning the Esso refinery at Bayway further chased the gloom of Winter Solstice.

Lionel Trains Catalog, 1954

In the early part of those magic weeks following Thanksgiving, my father would bring home the latest Lionel Trains catalog. Every boy could dream about owning the ultimate train set, Lionel’s Santa Fe Super Chief streamliner, with its red and yellow “warbonnet” -faced diesels pulling silver cars, including a “vista dome” and a rounded-end observation car. The thought of riding such a train in real life, way out West, was an equally unattainable fantasy. But we did have short hops on our threadbare but lovable locals, that took us to Newark, New York, or the Shore. And I loved my 027-gauge set that enlivened the gloom of our cobwebby cellar, complete with black engine that puffed white smoke. But the dear and familiar didn’t preclude dreaming of the far away; and of grander trains, big and small.

Thankfully at Christmastime we can still indulge in unabashed sentimentality. Christmas cards now show 1950’s downtown street scenes that look as remote and picturesque today as did the snowy scenes of horse-drawn sleighs wending though bucolic landscapes of Christmas cards from childhood years. The “good old days” seem to follow about three generations behind the more jaded present. Will today’s young children someday see scenes of shopping malls as evocative of a golden past? Will they remember navigating freeway exits in SUVs with fondness? Playing with the latest video console under the flickering of a 58-inch wall-mounted flat screen TV?

Maybe so. Personally, I would feel vindicated to live long enough to see our regional shopping mall fall to the wrecker’s ball. It would help make amends for the savage wrecking of my beloved Penn Station in the 1960s. But the analogy doesn’t completely hold up. Penn Station preceded the throwaway society. Built for the ages, it didn’t demolish easily.

To whomever reads this…Merry Christmas!