Dec 8, 2023 4 min read

This week, I packed up a large cardboard box and sent it off to a place out west. Inside the box are three blue metal cans of old film – and inside those relics are family memories.

Many of us who were little kids in the early 1960s probably have some of those cans of film stowed away in attics or crawl spaces; the film is the work of our dads who, upon the birth of first babies, purchased the film cameras to capture the images, and also the projector with which to watch them.

I’ve not seen what’s on that film for more than 50 years, but I can almost picture it, because I was there, starring in those moments. Christmas morning my sisters and I would walk down the stairs, blinded by the lights attached atop the camera like a 30-point rack on a reindeer. In those scenes we are squinting as we arrive at the bottom of the stairs to find the floor around the tree festooned with wrapped packages.

On screens marred by scratches and flecks of light, the scene moves on to show us sitting among the packages, unearthing dolls and games and new pajamas. We are three skinny little girls – one with curly dark hair, one with lighter hair and I, the middle one with straight medium brown hair with bangs cut too short – always too short.

That was before I’d grown into my sizable forehead, a facial feature embarrassingly evident in later films – at my First Communion picnic in the backyard, or at summer vacations. Every early milestone included our dad with that camera. Later, when the film had been developed and returned to us, we’d line up on the sofa as he threaded the film through the projector, turned off the living room lights, and we all watched as the numbered countdown began, accompanied by the rolling and clicking sound of the machine.

Last weekend I captured a family celebration on my phone, not one but two sing-throughs of Happy Birthday. Once home, I transferred the video from my phone to my laptop, where I’ll keep it in case we ever want to watch it again. Knowing how easy that was, I thought about the effort that my and other fathers gave to capture those early years – the heavy camera and that light bar and then, later, the fiddling with the projector so we could all watch. What work it took to commit the silly gestures of little kids to film, to serve memories later on.

I’d mailed the box to a company that digitizes old film. For a fee they’ll convert the heavy cans of celluloid into digital files, to be placed on my laptop to keep forever. I’m imagining what the workers at that company must think as they rack up and roll the film of hundreds of families. To the young people doing the digitizing, the 1960s must have been a blinking and scratched long-ago time lived in black and white, filled with little girls squinting at the dad behind the camera.

I’m hoping to have the files back in time for Christmas. Maybe we’ll all sit on the sofa together. I’ll connect my laptop to the big-screen TV and we’ll watch as Christmas 1964 unfurls before our eyes. Were we ever that small? Were we ever so excited about a Christmas morning? Was my forehead really that huge?

And whatever happened to the dolls that Santa brought us? They were plowed under with time, I suppose – buried like the Christmas morning memories would have been. If not for the dad behind the camera.