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Christmas for me has always been a time special time, 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? Those who see the dark side today of jobs going over seas, factories closing, mortgage foreclosures may feel there has never been one like it. 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 became 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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