Christmas Lights

Ah, Christmas lights!! They are so beautiful in the night. On our street several houses are adorned with beautiful Christmas lights to welcome in the Holiday season 2011. For this photo, I used the cam on my iPhone with an app that one of my Daughter's told me about. It really works well.

We just returned from a brief shopping trip to the Mall, downtown. And I mean brief!! There seemed to be millions of shoppers all coming in cars and seeking a parking place. Seemingly endless lines of cars waited for the proverbial parking place. Is that man going out? How about that couple over there in the Lexus? Nope, appears they are just recovering from the drive to the Mall and are resting before getting out of their car and going into a store to get those kind of 'last minute gifts', that we all seem to have to get during the week before Christmas. Ah, but I have a secret. It is too early in this writing to tell you my secret, but will do before I finish this "Hemingway-esque" bit of literary nonsense on this December afternoon.

My Dad, bless him, always wanted a target pistol. Of course, we could never afford it with his and Mom's salaries in the 1950's and later. So my Mom bought him a beautiful ring with a red stone for Christmas and wrapped it in a shoe-box size box, with a hammer to weigh it down so it might appear to be something else. My Dad had lifted that box before Christmas, I don't know how many times, to kind of gauge the weight of the item inside. Well to make a long story short, was my Dad ever disappointed!! But he got over it, and all worked out fine and he liked the ring very much. The lesson here: Don't try to fool your loved ones with those kind of tricks, but I must confess--OH-OH, I have done a similar thing this Christmas in one of the packages for one of my beloved family members. I wonder if they have done that to one of my packages??8-))

I think back to Christmases spent on the ranch in Arizona with one of my Grandpas. What an interesting way of life: horses, cattle, the cowboys, hearing the generator going on out back when someone got up in the night, seeing the jerky out on the clothes line drying out. How delicious it was. And knowing that Grandpa Jay would send a shoebox full every year to us to enjoy! How great is that!!

So at this time of year, I find the tender and meaningful moments in my life are in my memories. I shall never forget them. Such things as the old house we lived in for many years in that small citrus producing town where I was a newspaper boy, shoeshine boy, and worked in grocery stores. I remember old C.J. the owner of one of the markets where my Mom worked and I did too later in life. You knew everyone in the small town, even by name. There was a J. C. Penney store and a Western Auto, where I bought one of my bicycles when I had earned enough money to do so. When Aunt Winna would be over visiting us, she would walk downtown with my Sister and me and buy us some clothes at Penney's. How kind it was of her in those days.

So Christmas is made of memories for us. The past is always interesting but so is the present, and as this Christmas comes to us, that old prayer that I once heard from a Pastor at a church is reigning in my mind:

"Lord, I do give thee thanks for the abundance that is mine."

----a Pastor

The Secret

"Christmas--that magic blanket that wraps itself about us, that something so intangible that it is like a fragrance. It may weave a spell of nostalgia. Christmas may be a day of feasting, or of prayer, but always it will be a day of remembrance--a day in which we think of everything we have ever loved."

--Augusta E. Rundel