My late grandmother, maybe the best person I ever knew, used to tell me a wonderful Christmas story.
Two brothers were in their early 20s. Although they had grown up loving Christmas, they had become sort of jaded and didn’t even have trouble getting to sleep on Christmas Eve anymore. Christmas is for kids, they said.
Then the family got a big surprise. Their mother, in her early 40s, got pregnant. She had a baby in the summer, and the two boys loved their little sister very much. They decided to make her first Christmas a wonderful one, and it filled them with all the excitement and joy of the season they thought had died in them.
Yes, Christmas is for kids. For the kid in all of us.
The world has changed so much since I first celebrated Christmas. Throughout the first half of my childhood, we lived in western Ohio, only about 120 miles from my grandparents. It didn’t always snow at Christmas, but it did as often as not and it was always cold.
What I remember most is how difficult it was to get to sleep and how much anticipation I felt in the days leading up to the 25th. I know I received gifts that mattered a lot to me at the time, but I remember only a very few of them.
Once I came of age, Christmas wasn’t what it once was to me. Remember, it’s for kids.
The only one that stands out in my young adulthood was 1977, when my first wife and I were living in Vienna. We did a charter trip to London for Christmas week. Not the best time to be tourists. Lots of stuff was closed at least part of the week. Mostly we shopped and went to plays and movies.
I think we only saw two plays, one the very venerable “The Mousetrap,” which had been running in the West End since 1952. I remember wondering how long it would last. My marriage made it through two more years, but “The Mousetrap” was still running till earlier this year, when COVID-19 put an end to a 68-year run.
It played for more than 28,000 performances.
Most of the movies we saw weren’t memorable, although I did get to see one of them in a massive old movie palace than held about 4,000 people.
It was packed, too, for a little thing called “Star Wars.”
After that, Christmases got dull for me. I’ve written before about flying cross country in 1989 for my grandmother’s last Christmas, but except for that, the next one that mattered was 1992.
Kids, you know.
I met and married Nicole that fall, and got two wonderful children — ages 12 and 7 — in the bargain. The next 10-15 Christmases were wonderful. Seeing Pauline and Virgile opening presents I knew they had wanted filled by heart with joy.
Of course they grew up too, but in 2008 even more happiness came along when our first grandchild was born. The next picture is one of the cutest I’ve ever seen, baby Madison Nicole just three months old with Santa Claus in Seattle.
And with one exception, our grandchildren have made every Christmas since then wonderful. Lexington Wesley came along in 2011 and Albanie Yvonne in 2014. We got three more at the same time when Pauline remarried Johnathan, who brought Malachi, Simon and Coen to the party. Three wonderful boys.
Since Albanie, the youngest, is only 6, I figure I’ll have the joy of Christmas with grandchildren for most of the rest of my life.
I can’t imagine anything more wonderful.
