By Jay Moore

Had you opened the pages of the Abilene Reporter-News in December 1966, you would have learned plenty; such as, you could get a 5-foot-tall Douglas fir Christmas tree from Wolfe’s Nursery starting at $5.95. At Westgate Nursery they were selling flocked trees in a variety of pastel colors for $10 and, unless you wanted to be the only cheapo on the block, you got the flocked.

Abilene parents looking to delight their kids on Christmas morn, could go by Gibson’s Discount Center on Barrow and pick up a slot car race track, transistor radio or Daisy B-B gun, each for under $10. On sale at Mackey’s Sports and Toy World at North 1st and Willis (remember  the excitement of going there!) was a Barbie kitchen for $4 and electric football games were flying out the door at $3.94. Mackey’s also stocked one of the hottest 1966 Christmas gifts around, Creepy Crawlers. At Western Auto a Buzz Bike Speedster — the Western Flyer knockoff of the pricier and more popular Schwinn Stingray — was $35, but you had to put the thing together. 

If you were expecting a Christmas crowd for dinner, Wyatt’s Cafeteria offered a complete meal to feed 20 people — turkey, cornbread dressing, giblet gravy, cranberry sauce and three pumpkin pies — for $18.95. You can barely get a burger, fries and drink for that today.

If you preferred to cook ol’ Tom yourself, M-System, Super Duper and JRB Grocery were all selling turkeys for 37 cents a pound, pumpkin pies would set you back 50 cents. As for the office Christmas party, well it might have been at Old Abilene Town’s Golden Stagecoach, the Saddle and Sirloin or Mack Eplen’s on Hickory Street.

In 1966, the Abilene Retail Merchants Association staged their second season of Mother Gooseland at Fair (Rose) Park. The nursery rhyme themed affair kicked off on Thanksgiving night with some 2,000 of us showing up to take in the 45,000-watt lighted spectacle. Controversy quickly ensued as many protested the non-religious theme that seemed to promote Little Boy Blue tending his sheep by day over the shepherds watching their flocks by night. The Yuletide controversy increased over the next couple of years, until the Merchants Association threw in the towel in 1970, offering instead, free tickets for Abilene children to see a sacrosanct performance of  The Messiah.

At the invitation of River Oaks retailers (and with no public outcry) Santa parachuted into town. (Unlike Mother Goose, St. Nick is mentioned in the Good Book: see Isaiah 63:2) Children massed in a vacant lot at S. 14th and the Winters Freeway to anxiously watch as a red-suited Santa floated gently down into their midst — or nearly, a strong wind sent him eastward, missing the confused kids by several hundred yards. 

For the 43rd year running, the Abilene Garden Club selected winners for their Christmas Lighting and Decorating Contest. Winners were named in four categories — best doorway, window, tree and yard. A.C. Sides, Mary Doss, Earl Vaughn and S.M. Moore claimed the honors, each receiving a new electric coffee urn from WTU. 

Two weeks before Christmas an estimated 7,500 folks bundled up and headed out to the stadium — recently renamed in honor of Coach Shotwell — to watch the third annual Pecan Bowl. The Abilene-hosted NCAA bowl game was the brainchild of local insurance man Ham Middlebrooks and the 1966 contest pitted the Wildcats of Parsons College against the Sioux of North Dakota. North Dakota jumped to a 14-0 lead in the first quarter before finishing Parsons off, 42-24. There would be just one more year of the Abilene Pecan Bowl before the game moved to Arlington, fading out altogether three years later.

Three days before Christmas ‘66, HSU president Dr. Elwin Skiles called longtime Reporter-News writer and HSU alum Katharyn Duff to tell her he was coming to the newspaper office with a big story. Duff grabbed her pen and pad to meet Skiles in the office of the publisher. With a crowd looking on, Skiles instead presented Duff an early Christmas present, her 1936 HSU diploma. Upon graduation 30 years earlier, she had been short the $10 fee to pay for the sheepskin so Dr. Skiles set things right. (Eliminating the fee for an earned diploma might’ve really set things right.)

Like Mother Gooseland, so much has come and gone over the past 50 or 60 years. The Pecan Bowl is largely forgotten, even Parsons College closed in 1973. And we have lost some good folks, like Katharyn Duff and Ham Middlebrooks and Dr. Elwin Skiles. You can no longer find 50-cent pies, Creepy Crawlers or new transistor radios and you certainly can’t shop at Gibson’s, Mackey’s or Western Auto. There is no more Old Abilene Town, Mack Eplen’s, Saddle and Sirloin or Wyatt’s (sigh). In 1968, the Garden Club quit judging our Christmas decor,  you can no longer get your tree at Wolfe’s or Westgate, and you can’t shop for your Christmas dinner trimmings at Super Duper, JRB or M-System. All gone. All history. All memories. All of it, long past.

And yet, despite all the changes in our city and in our lives, one constant has pierced through the past decades — through the past 200 decades — and straight into 2023…Christmas.

Had you opened the opinion page of the Abilene newspaper on Christmas Eve 1966, above the daily editorial was printed a prayer, a reminder of the abiding and the changeless: “Bless us, our Father, as we seek to share with others the wonder of Thy love for all mankind, and the reward of living daily in harmony with Thee, through Christ, our Redeemer. Amen.”

Jay Moore is an Abilene historian and creator of the video series, History in Plain Sight