Our very best Christmas

uncle Alan

uncle Alan

Joined
Jul 11, 2004
Messages
1,830
Many years ago Mom & I prepared for Christmas . I had painted our few lights with naik polish on the pine-top tree and took our last $5.00 ,rode the bus to town,ate a hamburger steak lunch & went to a movie. We had no gifts for each other but our love.

Uncle Alan....
 
I remember a few "hard candy Christmases" myself. An orange and an apple (a novelty in mid-winter), a few pieces of colored hard candy and just maybe a few inexpensive stamped tin toys from the dime store, but not always. The special part was sitting under the tree with the house lights off and staring at the little nativity scene while Mom recounted the Christmas story. I wish they still made those little lights with bubbles in them. Maybe they do and I just don't know about them. But they wouldn't be the same anyway. It was Mom and Dad that made them special.

[video=youtube;yb7iG5zEyYQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb7iG5zEyYQ&feature=related[/video]
 
Gollnick said:
For anyone whose parents have gone ahead, this is what you realize.
Click to expand...

Indeed. Very much so. My brother and I knew from a fairly early age that there was no Santa (we used our Hardy Boys skills to find the truth), but we never let on to our parents. Not because we were afraid that it would change the gift giving, but because the illusion of Santa was, in and of itself, another gift that they had given us. It added yet another dimension to the family celebration, the idea that someone, somewhere, outside our family loved us as well and would want to see us happy, going out of their way to make it so. As one might deduce, we took "Santa" with deeper religious connotations which was as our parents had intended. Of course this was before the now-pervasive mass marketing of X-Mass where the gift is given greater emphasis than the giver, or the spirit in which it was given. Things do change.
 
The Christmas before my dad passed away, I was five years old. I still remember it vividly. It was the only Christmas of my life that I remember where I got something I wanted. My dad was already awfully ill then and he had been in and out of the hospital, but he made an effort to be with us on Christmas and made sure that I got the presents I wanted. Almost 30 years later, and I can honestly say I haven't really had a good Christmas since then. Oh, well.
 
Nice story. I am reminded in many ways of my own father. And of my own youth growing up on an Arkansas cotton farm, just down the road from Dyess, where Johnny Cash grew up.
 
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