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I remember the Roy Rogers’ gun and holster set like it was yesterday. One Christmas it was a Lionel Train. ‘Course, I had to share that with two brothers. It was way too expensive to go to one individual.
The Buck knife was special. It wouldn’t exactly shave the hair off your arm but it sure made you feel “grown up” when you slid it into your front pants pocket. The Gilbert Chemistry Set made mad scientists out of all of us. The Red Ryder BB gun turned us into soldiers.
My parents didn’t bother to wrap the Western Flyer. It was just sitting beside the tree, like a winged Pegasus waiting to take me on all sorts of epic adventures.
I jumped ditches on that bike, raced David Mark to school, rode back to the house with one hand full of groceries….. If you looped a ball glove over the handlebars, it would automatically take you to the nearest baseball field.
My favorite Christmas gift ever was a Timex watch. It was shock resistant, anti-magnetic (whatever that meant), sported a red sweep second hand and glowed in the dark. It started a love affair with timepieces that I carry to this day.
It was always about the gift.
Oh, we’d sing “Joy to the World” and “It Came upon a Midnight Clear” at church. Brother L. H. Hatcher would preach his heart out on how Mary and Joseph made that long trek down to Bethlehem to pay some taxes. I remember how “sore afraid” those poor shepherds were on that miraculously “lit-up at night” hillside.
And I did recoil a bit about them having to lay that new baby in a feeding trough.
But mostly I tried to be quiet and look like I was listening…..while my mind was under the tree back at the house. We didn’t have visions of sugar plums or care about reindeer rustling around on the roof. We wanted to run our hand over that gift, shake it, smell it, guess what it might could be…..
In a cruel sort of Christian way, Mother would read the ENTIRE second chapter of Luke on Christmas morning, BEFORE we were allowed to open the first gift! I mentioned to her several years in a row that Bro. Hatcher had covered all of that just this past Sunday!