December 2024

The Christian Bible says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself”. Almost every religion known to man commands or calls us to treat our neighbors with love, care, kindness, and respect.

Well, here we go, my 85th Christmas. I don’t remember much about Christmas present or Christmas itself until my 3rd Christmas. We had moved over north of Pollard, Arkansas on the Jerry Taylor place in the Langley Chapel area. I remember getting a little toy glass army tank full of little hard candies. My grandpa, Chris Murley, got me a wooden ‘Tommy gun’ that when you pulled the trigger it made a clacking sound. My mother hated it, and told Grampa so. Mom would never have made it in the diplomatic world. I know it hurt Grampa’s feelings. This would have been in 1943. WWII was in full swing, money was tight, but we had plenty of good food because we raised or grew it all ourselves. I remember my Uncle Hermon and Aunt Hazel and their kids Bill and Jean coming to visit, and maybe others. Christmas during those years was always closely linked with the Little Methodist Church, called Langley Chapel, and later on when we moved different churches, always it seemed to be Methodist. There most usually were plays and readings and songs put together into a program for all, both young and old in the days before Christmas. It was a time of joy and caring, and of deep sadness, for there were young men falling on foreign soil, away from their families, usually, for the first times in their lives. In the next 10 years we moved twice more. First, west of Pollard, where I started school just as that great war was ending. Christmases got better, our schools had programs and parties and sweet foods. Oh yeah, sugar was fast becoming my big addiction! And as the war ended and we moved again about 1950 to west of McDougal, radio stations picked up the Christmas beat and we, as kids, were encouraged to write letters to Santa ( in care of the radio station), which would get read over the air. Then, on Christmas Eve, the government sent airplanes and radar operators to track Santa’s trek from the North Pole to our homes, laden in his big sled drawn by 8 tiny reindeer, with toys and treats and socks and, ugh, underwear and other clothes, and books, and maybe, just maybe, if you had been a good kid, a RED RIDER CARBINE BB GUN…OH WOW! Yes, those were the days to remember. The excitement and the foods and families together, it kept you warm through those cold days and nights of December. Somewhere along by the later 50’s, after high school and I had moved away from home, I had trouble holding on to that Christmas spirit, that excitement, the warmth of the times. In 1961 I was able to get leave from the Airforce to come home over Christmas. I rode a Trailways bus from Biloxi, Miss to Corning. Johnny Mansker picked me up and took me out east of town to Mom and Dads house, and the next day, I got right back on that bus and retraced my steps. As times have changed, and traditions tumbled, and family spread apart in this our new world, all I have of that Christmas Spirit is the memories of those days gone by. Maybe that is just the purpose of it anyway, to imbed those feelings of fantasy into young minds, and give them great memories to remember back as their hair turns grey and their steps slow, and all those people from those magical days slowly pass away and become just puffs of smoke with warm feelings. We need that, you know. We need those memories of a time that even though we had wars, and adversities amongst, we had a unity that gave us comfort. We trusted our leaders back then. We trusted our neighbors back then. Families were units back then, and we looked forward to those yearly unions. Oh, I am not saying all is bad now, but it is a different time, and already I see our youth, even the teens, shaping their societies, so even though what was then was important to us, we must remember, as a society we have changed ever so much over the centuries and the decades, and the generations, that we are the same people, with many of the same goals and beliefs. So, they say that Christmas is the time for love. Maybe we should try to keep that part of Christmas, and hold it separate from the world of capitalism and spending and bright lights and tensile. And kids, go ask your Gramps what their Christmas was like when they were little, and watch a smile come to an old wrinkled grey haired face and light to old eyes dimmed with age. Who knows, it might awake something in you. Merry Christmas from Larry and Kerry and the two dogs Spirit and Elliot and the ponies Tobi and Harmony. I hope this will be a Christmas of fond memories to you.