Page A2 / The Joan De Arc Crusader / Wednesday, December 24, 2025

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“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” – Voltaire

Letter from the Editor

Revisiting my 1968 Christmas Wish List

by J. Bueker

     And a very happy holiday to all our faithful readers!
     Some months ago, as I was rummaging through my formidable collection of Joan De Arc artifacts, I was quite delighted to unearth of all things my handwritten Christmas wish list from A.D. 1968. I had not gazed upon this quaint and timeworn document in decades and immediately thought, hey, a discussion of its contents might just make for a delightfully nostalgic holiday editorial! Well anyway, that’s what you’re getting.
     No reminder of the list’s contents was the least bit necessary for me as Christmas 1968 is one of my supreme childhood memories and I still recall the details quite well. Yet the list also provides a nice snapshot in time reflecting my artistic and writing skills in late 1968 and its historical value is of course inconceivably immense. As a holiday exercise in remembrance, I thought I would briefly critique the merits of this ancient relic 57 years hence for our readers’ Joan De Arc holiday nostalgia and merriment.
    First of all, the 1968 wish list was executed on a piece of standard typing paper using a No. 2 pencil, which was my standard practice for all such projects during this period. I know this because I still have extant ink and pencil scribblings on typing paper from the same era including scenes I devised and illustrated from my fave TV shows like The Time Tunnel and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. The font style of the wish list is an interesting mix of both cursive and block lettering that I probably thought presented an appealing stylistic effect.
     Yes, I do find it a bit distressing that I managed to misspell the word “Christmas” and I can only attribute such a startling error to my haste and excitement in crafting this crucially important holiday entreaty. I was undoubtedly quite eager to get the list into my parents’ hands as quickly as humanly possible, but there really is no excuse for such carelessness from a 5th grader at the prestigious Sahuaro Elementary School. Such miscues on my part were not unprecedented however -- I’m reluctant to confess I routinely rendered the name of my own street as “Joan De Ark” during our early years at 3219.
    The festive wish-list header is adorned by a lovely Christmas Tree, the artistic merits about which I will not boast but merely characterize as serviceable to the task. I find it notable that I took the trouble to reiterate the year of 1968 no less than three times on the page, twice in the header and again in the cheery little coda I appended at the bottom. This leads me to speculate that I likely devised similar Christmas wish lists in 1967 and 1969 that are now sadly lost to history.
     In addition to my primary gift request, the electric football game I so deeply coveted, I seem to have also felt an urgent need for a pair of football pants, surely due to my rapidly growing interest in the game and the emerging sandlot football scene in our neighborhood. My thought was to strategically assign this request to my Grandma Lois, almost certainly to lighten the financial load on my notoriously tight-fisted parents and thereby increase my chances of getting all the other stuff I wanted. When Christmas at last arrived though, Santa had generously gifted me with the pants alongside both the electric football game and the Sgt. Storm spaceman action figure I had also solemnly requested. What Grandma gave me the previous evening I cannot recall but I’m sure it was nice. All in all, a sublimely memorable Yuletide.
     By the way, a grateful shout-out goes to my mother, whose loving foresight was alone responsible for keeping and preserving such priceless Joan De Arc emphemera as this.
    My wish list for Christmas 2025 is much simpler and needn’t be commited to typing paper: Peace on earth and the Suns finally winning that godforsaken NBA championship. Merry Christmas.

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LETTERS

But wait, there’s more!

       Regarding your Jade East cologne article in the latest edition of the Crusader (December 25, 2024): I am in possession of several other toiletry items that were originally housed at 3219, one being my prized bottle of Oh! de London circa 1965-ish, which still has an inch of fragrance left. I also have the bottle of Khadine perfume oil that Doug Burkett gave me in 1970. Treasures!

Barbie Bueker Formichella

 We welcome your letters at jdacrusader@aol.com.

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“Chuck’s Big Backyard Adventure”

      Greetings, neighbors! Today I’m going to crank up the Wayback Machine and share a fond memory of my childhood, going back to maybe fifth grade or thereabouts. My memory of things that many decades distant may be a bit fuzzy, but I clearly remember most, if not all, of the important details.
     I was out playing one sunny summer day at a friend’s house, a person whose name I cannot now recall but who lived just around the corner from us on 33rd Avenue. Having played the entire day with my friend and his toys, it was time for me to head home, and it somehow occurred to me that it might be possible to walk back a shorter distance to my house by scaling the fence and walking along the backbone of fencing that separated the houses on Willow Avenue from those on Joan De Arc Avenue. In theory, I would only need to walk just a few houses distance and then drop right into my own backyard, saving myself some precious steps. I recognized at the time that this was not a practical alternative to simply using the sidewalk, but I was curious to know if it was possible, and so I set off on this brave experiment.
     The fences in Surrey Heights at the time were not uniformly constructed the way they are in modern neighborhoods, but were rather a hodgepodge of whatever the homeowners could afford to put up. The gold standard of traversable fencing would be concrete block, but most of the fences where we lived were of the post, beam and picket variety. This meant that walking atop these fences involved shimmying along a narrow shelf of rough-cut wood, with ankles and pants brushing precariously against the pickets that threatened to splinter with every step. This would prove to be, as it turned out, the Mount Everest of walking home.
     I was at roughly the midpoint of the journey when I encountered my first insurmountable obstacle. I had just started across the segment of fencing behind the Mitchell’s house when a lady and her dog launched themselves like a torpedo from their dwelling on the Willow side of the fence, yelling and barking fiercely at me, clearly unaware of the gravity of my epic excursion. “What the hell are you doing up there?” yelled the lady. I assume the dog was barking something along similar lines.
     My instinctive reaction was to jump away from the aggressors, landing me firmly in the middle of the Mitchell’s backyard. After gathering myself, an examination of my options revealed that there was no way to rescale the fence from that particular yard, although I wouldn’t want to face that lady and her stupid dog again anyway. Unfortunately, the Mitchell’s side-gate exit was smartly and securely locked -- I was trapped. My only recourse was to knock on the backdoor of the Mitchell house, sheepishly confess my situation to Helen Mitchell, and slink through their house back to the sidewalk, broken and defeated.
     So, what did I learn from my little experiment? Obviously, I did learn firsthand that walking the sidewalk is a far superior mode of transportation when compared to balancing along the back fences of total strangers. I learned that no matter how important your line of scientific inquiry is to you, there will be someone waiting to wreck it out of ignorance. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I learned that when faced with irredeemable failure it is best to admit to yourself and Mrs. Mitchell that you were wrong and be sure to save that lesson in your head for at least 60 years.
     I hope all my family and friends have a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, and that their journeys are safe no matter what path they choose for themselves. Just watch out for the dogs.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________JDA

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