Posted by
RacKoons on Thursday, December 25, 2008 12:59:49 PM
Having loved Christmas ever since I was 4, that was my first memory of it, I was thinking of gifts from Christmases Past. The year was 1943 and my Dad was in the South Pacific. I was visiting my great great grandmother and she returned the visit as Mom worked downtown in Phila. at the Telephone Co. We lived with my grandparents and Grandmother Luger, yes, she was German from Germany, was watching me as I ate a blue Christmas ball! In 1945, Dad was home and he and my Aunt Thirza built a Christmas village with cardboard cutouts and some lead people from the village. Yes,a they were made out of the un-PC lead in those days.I still have them and I still put up my own village each Christmas. 3 Grandsons have now played with those people and villages. One Christmas, while living in the dreaded Rochester, NY, the hometown of SNOW, we had to pick up my grandparents at the Buffalo ,(another horrid SNOW CITY), at the Railroad Station there. We 5 were the only people standing in 10 ft. snow drifts when they came off the train. It took us hours to return to Rochester. But, that Christmas, 1948, I got a basketball. I played BB until I was 60. In 1949, I got a red Christmas ball with Santa on it and my name. I still have it. Each Christmas back East, we listened to Lionel Barrymore play Scrooge on the radio. And I myself played the role in my 6th Grade presentation of The Christmas Carol. I still do the readings at my old church each year. Prayerfully, I am not Scrooge incarnate! In 1964, while teaching out in LB, Ca., all alone for the Nativity, my mom sent me a ticket from the 1964 Supposed Phillies' World Series. They never went of course, but it was a treasure. In 1980, my Dad died and I did his funeral at the oldest church in South Jersey, Old Brick , pre-Revolutionary War, right near Christmas and that same year, near Christmas '80, God gave me a second chance at marriage with Katy, from Austria. We just celebrated our 28th. The years travel quickly and domestic and international affairs go on and on. Yet, like Ralphie in The Christmas Story, I remember my gifts that touched me and even those that I gave to others. But the greatest gift I guess that I received was the fact that that same Aunt Thirza, from the 1940's prayed that I accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. It took my hard headed intellectualism to bow to His grace, but I finally did. And amazingly, ended up as a pastor, from whose pastorate, I retired last Jan. So this Christmas, we are in a new church, still retired, still teaching in the local college, but those years in the '40's were the foundation for the greatest gifts, Jesus and my wife, Katy.