Stories...

Holidays are for story-telling.  Stories establish identity in a community and, frankly, are just plain fun.  Christmas was a unique experience in my childhood home.  Saying that Christmas was my father's favorite holiday was an understatement at best.  The year he received the city prize was nothing short of spectacular...and it's a great story.

An outline of lights transformed our house into a Christmas wonderland.  Santa and his reindeer were on the roof.  Every yard evergreen boasted its own lights--I remember three.  Candles constructed from toilet paper rolls, sand, wood, and light bulbs flickered in the windows. (They looked better than they sound on paper.)  A live Christmas tree beckoned from the living-room window, and symmetrically from the study, and aluminum tree basted itself in the glow of a multi-hued light wheel.

A life-sized manger scene, complete with camels and donkeys, began the fiew on the front lawn.  Rolls of spun glass twinkling with colored lights covered a ten-foot, black, plastic cone (alias one-by-twos and chicken wire).  The nighttime effect was a space-age tree, suspended in mid-air.  Five-foot candy  cane candles and a handmade holly wreath welcomed visitors to the front door.  Santa and his reindeer made an encore appearance in the yard as well.  (Sort of the brother Darrell and the other brother Darrell syndrome.)  This more honored display had once been stolen, but my dad chased the thieves on foot until they dropped the display in either exhaustion or boredom.  And the ultimate dream for this professor of Chemistry was on the far left--a fifteen-foot hardwood tree, cut, stripped of its leaves, painted white and covered with hundreds of hanging test tubes, each filled with its own brightly colored chemical.

The prize was ours, probably more for persistence than for good taste.  My dad reached a pinnacle of achievement--and a turning point.  A car, distracted by the decorations, hit our car and knocked it through the neighbor's fence.  In the night, right after the judging, a wind storm hit.  The chemical tree collapsed, shattering text tubes all over the driveway and killing all the grass on that side of the yard.  (Fortunately, the EPA did not yet exist.  We probably created some three-headed frogs as well.)  The final and ultimate blow was a light bill twice the size of the cash prize.  My dad said we couldn't afford to wind the prize again.

Before the disasters and the winning of the prize, Christmas decorations were magic.  That year, I think I moved into an adult Christmas mode.  I never reclaimed that "childhood magic."  But in its void grew a sense of spiritual wonder.  Adult Christmases bestow the love of family and friends, traditions owr worship and music, and a new, breath-taking realization of the gift of God's love.

May your holidays be full of stories, old and new...