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People have different milestones where they
pause and reflect on their lives. It’s
a time for reflection and assessment.
Am I better or worse of at this point that last year, five years
ago, ten years ago? My personal milestones are Christmases.
It’s more than a special time of year.
It’s a point for considering accomplishments and unfilled
dreams. Very much to be
considered is what will the time be like between now and next Christmas.
At a point in life, especially, I have to accept I definitely
have more Christmases behind me than in the future. This season is darkened with our soldiers again
fighting on foreign battlefields and the national debt soaring to
staggering heights. There are those predicting hard economic times ahead, may even a serious recession. But it happened before—to a whole nation of workers. When the stock market crashed in 1929, the Depression—not a recession—gripped the country. Soup kitchens were everywhere. The government created public works jobs such as the Civilian Construction Corps. My father lost his businesses and had to go to work with the CCC in Pennsylvania working on the national parks. He came back, learned to be a plumber and saved enough to buy a farm. A six-pack of sodas was 25 cents and you could mix them: Cokes, Pepsis, Nehi orange or grape. You could buy a daily newspaper for three cents. The headlines were about someone named Hitler marching across Europe. But a child at Christmas is more interested in the Daisy BB gun on sale at the country store for $1. There were sad times, the kind that seem to come
only on that time when we should be happy.
One Christmas my uncle crawled up under his house with a pistol
and killed himself. They
said he had suffered from asthma for years and couldn’t stand it any
more. I remember how sad my grandmother looked, withered and thin
with age in her long gray dress. Another Christmas morning my great aunt Fannie
woke us up banging on the door to say Uncle Josh had died. I was left alone to play with my Gilbert microscope while my
father drove to a phone to tell the family and my mother stayed with
Aunt Fanny. Christmas dinner was always a major occasion. My father was one of eight children and all of them with their children went to my grandmother’s for dinner. The men at first at the huge table in the dining room. Then the women ate. Children ate at the kitchen table. A child doesn’t pay much attention to the national economy but knows when his allowance increases from a nickel to a quarter a week. Unfortunately, the two for a penny suckers are a penny apiece. America slowly began to come back from the Depression, but it wasn’t until the country geared up for military weapons that prosperity came. Then there was that terrible Christmas of 1941 when America was under attack by two of the most vicious and powerful nations the world had even known. America overcame World War II, and Korean and Vietnam and all the other aggressions against freedom. Any people who can come back strong from a
nationwide Depression, from attack by Germany and Japan, from Communists
in Korea and Vietnam can handle any thing that life throws at them.
A cherished vision is that Christmas when I
published my first newspaper in Camden, SC, and our daughter was born
six days before Christmas. She
was the most beautiful gift God could have given us. Still fresh in my memory as if it were yesterday is the times my second daughter and son were small and we went together looking for a Christmas tree. We took an ax and went to the back side of the farm. Snow was on the ground and light flakes falling. Each second of that experience floats through my mind with delirious delight. A time I’ll never see again. But the memory will always be there to sustain me. Christmas is a time to take stock and look back at other Christmases. Many faces are gone, never to be seen on earth again. Many memories fade into time. There may have been happier ones, but we are alive and America is still strong. America will survive good and bad leaders, foreign hatred and jealousy, attacks and intrigue. The spirit of this nation is unconquerable. That’s what we have to thank God for.
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