I dreamed a dream the other night that this year at Christmas, I could just go back and relive one of the 79 Christmas’s I have experienced in my life, instead of creating another one. Although most of them are lost to memory, a few of them are still there in my meandering thoughts. I can remember my wife’s last Christmas before she passed. I remember the year after our mother passed, six days before Christmas. I remember Christmas’s when you couldn’t see the tree for the presents. Kids parties at the fire station, when Santa came on the ladder truck. But my most precious Christmas was when I was about six or seven years old.
That year, 1947, my parents and my three brothers and I were living in an apartment fashioned out of the attic of an old house in Staples Minnesota. My dad worked in an ice cream shop up town. A job today that would be more appropriate for a high school kid, trying to make some spending money. The war was just over and there were no other jobs to be had.
Somewhere, Dad had found a Christmas tree and he’d hauled it up into our cramped living space and Mom decorated it with paper cut outs and popcorn strung into garlands. She even made an angel for the top. There was a string of bubble lights that dad would light for a few minutes each night and then quickly shut them off so they didn’t burn out. If one burned out, they all went out and he had no extras. Then came Christmas Eve and we gathered around the tree and the bubble lights stayed on at last. There was nothing under the tree. We sat there while Dad read the Christmas story from his bible and then he got up and went outside and came in with a red sled. It was obvious, it was a used sled that he had repainted. The kind with the metal runners. I remember Dad trying to be happy and festive and I remember Mom hanging her head and crying softly while she nursed the baby. Maybe it was the simplicity of it all and maybe it was just the humbleness of that Christmas Eve, that I can’t forget.
Christmas has never been about things for me. It has been about people. Suffering is always more easily tolerated when it is suffering shared. Happiness also is meant to be shared but the one ingredient, the one common denominator, that enhances happiness and tempers grief is love and that Christmas night was all about love and not any tangible things. Of the six players on that Christmas Eve, that night way back then, only three remain. We have all had wonderful lives. I for one am so grateful for the life I have had, the family I shared and the family I fostered and I’m so privileged to be a part of all of it. So grateful for the three family members that were there that night that have since passed on and the indelible memories I have of them. But the thing that makes me the happiest is just the fact that I remember that distant Christmas Eve, like it was last Christmas Eve. Something happened there that night that simply made it so unforgettable to me and I think I know now, what it was and I hope I never forget why. I wish I could drive back there on a quiet Christmas Eve and just park outside of where the house once stood and let the feelings of that night wash over me once more. Maybe I could even bring some bubble lights.
Mike
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