TfTD – “My Christmas”

My Christmas is Friends

Long before there was, “My Space”, My Books and My Pillow”, there was, “My Christmas”.

We couldn’t wait for the snow to fall. There was nothing like a good snowball battle. Nobody would get mad because they got hit. It was all in good fun. Come to think about it, we didn’t have any gloves either. Of the 24 cousins mixed in with a few friends about 10 of us would gather down by the spring where we got our drinking water, for a good snowball battle.

The spring was at the bottom of a 50-foot embankment behind Aunt Cleo and Uncle Herschel’s house. It was the perfect setting for a battle. After the battle, we used the embankment to create a good, “run-and-slide” in the snow. Within minutes, the embankment was as slick as ice and we were in, “snow heaven”, with emphasis on “we”, because my Christmas is truly a, “we” thing.

This year, most of us who played down by the spring are in heaven and they are there, not because they died, but because they met the requirements for heaven that the Pastor of the Church, “Mother Norton”, told us about.

Five of them grew up to become soldiers who fought for this country. Others became educators, preachers, successful blue collar workers, grandmothers and grandfathers. We all moved away from that embankment. In 2010 I returned to the overgrowth where I stood and I remembered. Once in a while we gather together again in Ohio, Washington, or West Virginia to say good-bye to one of us. Lord have mercy!

“Bless be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love.”

My Christmas Is Church

Christmas to me is, “Church”. I mean real Church. We had my Momma’s Church and Daddy’s Church. Both churches were as spiritually warm as a house that was heated by a good coal-stove. It was a warmth that seeped into your bones. It seemed to wake up each cell of your body. And your cells seemed to glow like the fire glowed. Daddy’s Church was the only Church that I have ever been a member of where the majority of the members were men. During the Christmas season, these big strapping coalminers would unite with the women and children and put on Christmas plays and give gifts to the children.

My mother’s Church was just a mile away and it did the same thing. Momma was the Church Treasurer. She kept the money in a mason jar in her closet. My we have come a long way! Those adults showed us that they cared by emerging from their rough lives to do tender things with us. They could have stayed home or gone to the local pub but they chose us instead. That is Christmas to me.

My Christmas Is Singing

Christmas to me is singing. I love, “O Come All ye faithful, Deck the Halls, Away in the Manger” and I love them especially the way the, “King’s College” Choir sings them. [Youtube Watch]. But I also love, “Winter Wonderland, Rudolph the Red-nose Reindeer, Up On The Housetop”, and I love “Santa Baby” as well.

My Christmas is God and Family

Christmas to me is my wife and children. All of us will be together this year because I will travel the globe in prayer for the one’s that won’t be present. It is a trip that I take every day. When I think about our Christmas’ together I think about God’s grace to us over the years. My wife has been an amazing woman. This year, it is important to me to say that she has been amazing and she is a woman according to God’s laws for marriage, she is not a man. When I think of the way she denied herself many things in favor of our children and how she continues to supoort her Perry even though she’d like to give me a bump on the head sometimes “LOL”, I can only say, “Thank God.” Our children continue to make us proud. But surely, above all else, my Christmas is Jesus Christ and therefore,

“Merry Christmas!”

That’s a little bit of what Christmas is to me.

Merry Christmas!