Scrooge, Lay-off, and Christmas

It is hard to remember every Christmas season I experienced, but a few stand out in my mind.  I remember Christmas 1957.  Santa brought me an airplane.  It was silver and black and had a friction mechanism that the more you pushed it before you let it go the faster it went.  It also had red lights that blinked as it rolled along the floor.  Unfortunately, it would not fly.  I know because I threw it from the deck of the second floor in the apartment that we stayed.

I remember Christmas 1958.  My sister and I got Zorro suits.  Mom took pictures of us in them.  We looked like matadors ready to fight the bull.  I am pretty sure the pictures were of us, but I could be mistaken because we had on masks like those that the real Zorro wore in the Disney movies.  No one knew who he was, so I'm not sure that is us in the picture.

Christmas 1959 was the last one we spent in the snow in Illinois.  I remember that the tree had lots of presents beneath it.  Mom took a picture of that one too.  One of the presents under the tree is Huckleberry Hound.  Huckleberry Hound was actually a target that had a gun with suction tip bullets. 

I remember that we got lots of guns, toy and real, for Christmas.  That was before the naysayers said that guns caused too much violence.  I guess the naysayers did not have my daddy as their dad.  Dad never allowed us to point our guns, toy or real, at people and pretend to kill them.  If we did, we felt daddy’s wrath.

When we moved back to Alabama, Christmas was not the same as up north.  Alabama, Chilton County especially, did not have the same economical advantages of Illinois.  That is why were moved north in the beginning.  Back in Alabama, dad did not work during the Christmas holidays. 

I remember him coming home with this grim look.  He would tell momma that he was on layoff for the holidays.  He was the junior man on the totem pole where he worked and because business was slow, companies, I called them Scrooges, laid off workers until after the holidays.

I do remember one special Christmas.  We wanted bicycles.  My sister, brothers, and I had suspicions that Santa might not be the real deal.  On this particular Christmas, we were going to stay up and watch to see if Santa actually would come. 

We did not have a fireplace, but we did have a small pot-bellied stove in the southeast end of the house.  We wanted to see if Santa could come down the stovepipe.  It was real small, and crooked, and from all the pictures that we saw, Santa was real big.  We wondered how Santa could keep his suit so clean climbing down chimneys without getting soot on them.

Back then, there were no presents under the tree until Christmas morning.  We went to bed pretending to be asleep, but Mr. Sandman filled our eyes with sleep.  We woke the next morning to see that somehow, some way, that Santa had left us new bicycles.  They were Huffy bicycles.  Mine was red and white twenty-six inches tall.  I rode that bike everywhere I went for years.  Of course, I made several modifications to that bike.  I removed the front fender.  I bent it in a wreck.  I took off the chain guard.  It got bent in a wreck.  I took off the reflectors which got mangled in a wreck.  I also bent the front forks.  That bike was one of the greatest Christmas gifts I ever received. 

As years passed and layoffs came every Christmas, the magic of Christmas vanished.  Magic is that way.  Magicians can make things disappear.  The Hopper family learned what the Magi, not magicians, did.  They were astronomists that studied the heavens and realized that God, a King of the Jews to them, was coming to earth.  They said that they had seen His star in the East and were following it.  They said where is He that born the Kings of the Jews for we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him.

We learned that Christmas is about the greatest gift that one can receive.  It is the gift of Jesus.  That is what Christmas is.  It is Christ’s Mass or worship of Christ.  The Apostle Paul reminds us that God sending Jesus to earth was the mystery of the Old Testament revealed in Jesus.  Santa, like Disney, may have a magical kingdom that will one day disappear.  Jesus’ coming ushered an eternal kingdom that is marvelous and will never disappear.

Sometimes I, and perhaps you also, make a wreck of God’s gift as I did with my bike.  My bike was a wonderful gift, but I abused it.  God gives us the gift of Salvation and we experience life’s wrecks.  I thank God for helping through my wrecks.  How about you?

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him (Matthew 2:1-2 KJV).