In celebrating my first Christmas in retirement, I am sharing past columns I’ve written about Christmas. I call them the 12 columns of Christmas. The following was written for Dec.18, 2016.
There are few things more precious than children at Christmas time. Their eyes sparkle. Their excitement can’t be contained.
In their minds lives the magic that makes reindeer fly and a fat man in a red suit squeeze through the chimney of a fireplace. For them, snow is not an inconvenience. It simply provides a base for a sleigh full of toys to land on a roof.
Christmas morning is the one day of the year when they are permitted to get up early after a night when it was difficult to get much sleep.
Yes, I know, Christmas isn’t about Santa and presents. It is, however, about giving. So we look to provide gifts for others, just as the most important gift was unwrapped for us more than 2,000 years ago.
That birth in Bethlehem was the essence of purity and innocence. If we take the time from our busy holiday schedules to look, those qualities are renewed in the faces of those little ones in our lives today.
I have fond memories of Christmases from my childhood. Sometimes life was tough, but my parents managed to give as much as they could afford to my sister, brother and me. Looking back, it was more than enough.
It’s not the toys that I remember from 60 years ago. The special things that I recall are the real Christmas tree, the train yard with a model village, and the arrival of our grandparents to witness all of the chaos of Christmas morning.
For years I thought about recreating that Christmas village under the tree for my own children. I still have those Lionel trains that would whistle and smoke as they traveled along the tracks, pulling cars that would load and unload cattle, barrels and milk cans. There were toy cars on gravel roads that were lined with miniature trees. There were houses and streetlights that would light up.
Some years I would put a train layout around the tree for our children to enjoy, but I never created the village that I knew from my own childhood. Perhaps it was better left as a perfect memory.
In our town, as in many others, the Christmas season began with a parade and the arrival of Santa around Thanksgiving. He would ride on a firetruck to the Masonic building, where he would climb the ladder and enter a second-floor window. The kids would stream into the building to tell him their Christmas wishes and receive a small stocking filled with candy.
Some memories fade as we age, but I still can see my parents as young adults with dark hair at Christmas time. I still remember my mother reading Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (“ ’Twas the night before Christmas”) on Christmas Eve, a tradition my wife insisted I continue with our young children.
Many of the traditions that she and I carried on every year were the result of those from our times growing up. Others were traditions we created together.
In those days, the entire day was about family, not football.
A cookie-baking marathon was one of the times we shared beginning when our children were young. We attended a Christmas Eve church service, sometimes visited friends, then hurried home to get the children into bed — and make sure they stayed there — so Santa could deliver all the presents and assemble the ones that came in pieces. Most years the presents spilled far beyond the area under the tree.
Then a few hours later, we would get up way too early after being awakened by children jumping on our bed. Usually we would make them wait at the top of the stairs so we could get ready to take pictures of their first glimpse of all the presents that had so magically appeared.
By midmorning, the chaos was over and it was time to prepare the Christmas dinner and hope there would be some rest in the afternoon.
Some families go to movies on Christmas afternoon. Others load into the car and visit relatives. What matters is that families are together and make memories.
It’s appropriate that the celebration that began with a child is so perfectly reflected today in the precious faces of children who still believe in magic. Those are the gifts that will stay with you for a lifetime.
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