12-23-01, Voice in the Crowd
Count Your Christmases
By Pete Chaney
IPS Features
This year America has a Christmas like none it’s seen in a long, long time. Still sifting through the ruins of the Twin Towers, fearful of Anthrax bearing mail, leery of taking a plane trip, it will stand out in memory especially for the younger generation. To them, there has never been another quite like it.
But there have been.
Christmas for me has always been a time of comparing
other Christmases. What have I
accomplished the past year? How
does it compare with other Christmases, other years?
How does the world compare?
Hundreds of thousands are losing their jobs now.
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.
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.
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.
It’s 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.
That’s what we have to thank God for.
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