I grew up near Gresham, Oregon. I treasured those Christmases when it snowed. I loved sledding and running in the snow with my Golden Retriever Champ, and snowball fights with the Kims and Swans and my best friend Jerry Hardin.
With my wife Nanci and daughters Karina and Angela, I had many wonderful Christmases later, only a mile and a half from my childhood house. But when I remember my first Christmases, I see above all the smiling face of my mom, who left this world in 1981. I wasn’t raised in a Christian home. No one in our family attended church or understood the meaning of the Son of God’s incarnation and redemption. Yet, somehow, my mom embodied Christmas. She decorated the whole house, nativity scene included, and to this day I can’t think of Christmas without picturing her. My dad was a tavern owner, a no-nonsense tough guy, but even he was won over by my mom’s love for Christmas.
My family celebrated on Christmas Eve, when we had our big meal, a Thanksgiving-like feast complete with turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, homemade rolls dripping with butter and strawberry jam, and big glasses of cold milk.
On Christmas morning, we’d open our mom-sown stockings, ignore the obligatory toothbrush, and sort the malted milk balls, Butterfingers, Snickers and Whitman’s Samplers, in those little yellow boxes with the green italic font, containing four chocolates. My brother Lance and I would trade with each other for the ones we liked best.
It wasn’t until I was fifteen, a sophomore at Barlow High School, the second year the school existed, that I personally came to know Jesus and first learned the true meaning of Christmas, that the God-Man came to live in our world to bring us forgiveness and salvation, and to show us how to love Him and each other.
Yet I still look back at all those childhood Christmases with awe and wonder. There was something so good and right and happy about my mom’s Christmases that even though Jesus wasn’t yet in my life or hers, I can retroactively read His loving presence back into my childhood, knowing His eye was already on me and has been ever since.
Happy birthday, Jesus!
