For those of you unlucky enough to be born in these harried times, you don’t remember Long Island ‘back in the day’ , especially at Christmas. There was, it seems to me, an electric excitement in those days - a different patina even to something as basic as snow - that I’m just not feeling anymore.

Of course, the difference could lie in me. Maybe no matter how I kicked and screamed against it, I got old.

Nah.

To begin with, the Bay Shore mall was in the open air. A

series of connected stores with no roof overhead. Nearby was the Farmer’s Market and the BayShore drive-in movie theater, which you could glimpse on your trip past on the single-lane of Sunrise Highway. The Gertz mall, a bit further west, had a bridge over the road that was fun to walk over: it connected you to a pizza place and a card store and various other places to hunt for shoes or gew-gaws.

Those living closer to the newly opened Smith Haven mall could spend hours in the place, never exhausting its endless possibilites.