I wanna Wii, iPod and parents who quit smoking
In ranking the greatest Christmas presents of my boyhood, the basketball hoop on the garage tops the BB gun and the electric football game.
(My list could be tragically different had Santa given me the BB gun before my little brother sat on my electric football game, denting the field so that every play ended with both teams in a group hug at the 45-yard line.)
Only as an adult did I realize the greatest gift actually came a month before the basketball hoop, when my dad quit smoking.
A 13-year-old girl named Sara from West Chicago called this newspaper the other day, hoping we could pressure her mother into giving up cigarettes.
Clean air is a wonderful present to give a kid for Christmas (or Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Ramadan, Rohatsu, New Year's or any occasion).
Marcy Traxler, director of business development for Alexian Brothers Hospital Network, still remembers the December when her mom quit smoking.
"It was a nice Christmas gift for me and my sister," recalls Traxler, a social worker who has run smoking-cessation support groups for more than 20 years.
"My mom quit when she was 65 years old," Traxler says. "And I'm really glad she did because she's 85 now."
While Traxler notes the added pressures and temptations of the holiday season can make quitting seem easier after the New Year, one motivator is a constant.
"A lot of it ends up being their family, that they want to be there for their kids," Traxler says.
My sister, Nancy, was about the age of Sara from West Chicago when she started begging my dad to quit smoking so he'd be around to watch us grow up.
In 1966, the Surgeon General issued the "caution" of "Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health." But Dad still plucked a pack each day from his Old Gold dispenser next to our back door -- until the month before Christmas in 1968.
My Uncle Don, another smoker, was in our barn dropping off a trio of runt pigs for me to raise, when an aneurysm burst in his head. Dad sent me running to the house to call our local doctor.
When the doctor arrived, he pronounced my uncle dead, and spent his medical efforts checking my 52-year-old dad, who was red in the face and breathing hard from his futile attempts at CPR.
Six days later, Dad quit smoking. He woke up that Sunday morning and didn't grab a pack from the Old Gold dispenser. He didn't take one the next day, or the next. I can't remember when he finally took down the dispenser. Dad never did say he quit smoking, but he never smoked another cigarette in the 35 years before he died at age 87. Had he quit earlier, he might have lived longer.
It was a joy growing up in a house with nonsmoking parents. Today, 21 million kids in the United States live in homes where a family member or visitor smokes on a regular basis. Secondhand smoke is blamed for as many as 300,000 respiratory tract infections in children younger than 18 months old. It aggravates hundreds of thousands of kids with asthma, and can lead to worse ailments.
Every suburban hospital has clinics and information about quitting smoking. So does the Illinois Tobacco QuitLine at 866 QUIT-YES (784-8937) and the Web site www.smokefree.gov. Perhaps Illinois' new ban on smoking in public buildings, which goes into effect Jan. 1, could inspire some of you smokers to quit as a gift to the people who love you.
With the money you save by no longer buying cigarettes, you'll have enough money by next December to buy a Wii, an iPod or practically anything else your loved ones might desire.
You already will have given them the gift of a lifetime.