The Christmas spirit--love...

The Christmas spirit--love--changes hearts and lives.

--Pat Boone

I have always thought of Christmas time...

I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.

--Charles Dickens

Christmas is the one day of the year...

Christmas is the one day of the year that carries real hope and promise for all mankind. It carries the torch of brotherhood. It is the one day in the year when most of us grow big of heart and broad of mind.

--Edgar Guest

The happiness and love...

The happiness and love on this one day
Bring thoughts which warm and cheer.
May we keep Christmas in our hearts
Through every day of all the year.

--Gertrude B. Holman

From Home to home...

From Home to home, and heart to heart, from one place to another. The warmth and joy of Christmas, brings us closer to each other.

--Emily Matthews

It is not even the beginning...

It is not even the beginning of Christmas unless it is Christmas in the heart.

--Richard Roberts

The simple shepherds heard...

The simple shepherds heard the voice of an angel and found their Lamb; the wise men saw the light of a star and found their Wisdom.

--Fulton J. Sheen

Angels, Once in a While

By Barb Irwin

In September 1960, I woke up one morning with six hungry babies and just 75 cents in my pocket. Their father was gone.

The boys ranged from three months to seven years; their sister was two. Their dad had never been much more than a presence they feared. Whenever they heard his tires crunch on the gravel driveway they would scramble to hide under their beds. He did manage to leave 15 dollars a week to buy groceries. Now that he had decided to leave, there would be no more beatings, but no food either. If there was a welfare system in effect in southern Indiana at that time, I certainly knew nothing about it.

I scrubbed the kids until they looked brand-new and then put on my best homemade dress. I loaded them into the rusty old '51 Chevy and drove off to find a job. The seven of us went to every factory, store, and restaurant in our small town. No luck. The kids stayed, crammed into the car and tried to be quiet while I tried to convince whomever would listen that I was willing to learn or do anything. I had to have a job. Still no luck.

The last place we went to, just a few miles out of town, was an old Root Beer Barrel drive-in that had been converted to a truck stop. It was called "The Big Wheel." An old lady named Granny owned the place and she peeked out of the window from time to time at all those kids. She needed someone on the graveyard shift, 11 at night until seven in the morning. She paid 65 cents an hour and I could start that night.

I raced home and called the teenager down the street that baby-sat for people. I bargained with her to come and sleep on my sofa for a dollar a night. She could arrive with her pajamas on and the kids would already be asleep. This seemed like a good arrangement to her, so we made a deal. That night when the little ones and I knelt to say our prayers we all thanked God for finding Mommy a job.

And so I started at the Big Wheel. When I got home in the mornings I woke the baby-sitter up and sent her home with one dollar of my tip money--fully half of what I averaged every night.
As the weeks went by, heating bills added another strain to my meager wage. The tires on the old Chevy had the consistency of penny balloons and began to leak. I had to fill them with air on the way to work and again every morning before I could go home.

One bleak fall morning, I dragged myself to the car to go home and found four tires in the back seat. New tires! There was no note, no nothing, just those beautiful brand-new tires. Had angels taken up residence in Indiana? I wondered.

I made a deal with the owner of the local service station. In exchange for his mounting the new tires, I would clean up his office. I remember it took me a lot longer to scrub his floor than it did for him to do the tires.

I was now working six nights instead of five and it still wasn't enough. Christmas was coming and I knew there would be no money for toys for the kids. I found a can of red paint and started repairing and painting some old toys. Then I hid them in the basement so there would be something for Santa to deliver on Christmas morning. Clothes were a worry, too. I was sewing patches on top of patches on the boys' pants, and soon they would be too far gone to repair.

On Christmas Eve the usual customers were drinking coffee in the Big Wheel. These were the truckers, Les, Frank, and Jim, and a state trooper named Joe. A few musicians were hanging around after a gig at the &&&Legion and were dropping nickels in the pinball machine. The regulars all just sat around and talked through the wee hours of the morning and then left to get home before the sun came up. When it was time for me to go home at seven o'clock on Christmas morning I hurried to the car. I was hoping the kids wouldn't wake up before I managed to get home and get the presents from the basement and place them under the tree. (We had cut down a small cedar tree by the side of the road down by the dump.)

It was still dark and I couldn't see much, but there appeared to be some dark shadows in the car--or was that just a trick of the night? Something certainly looked different, but it was hard to tell what. When I reached the car, I peered warily into one of the side windows. Then my jaw dropped in amazement. My old battered Chevy was full--full to the top with boxes of all shapes and sizes.

I quickly opened the driver's side door, scrambled inside and kneeled in the front facing the back seat. Reaching back, I pulled off the lid of the top box. Inside was a whole case of little blue jeans, sizes 2-10! I looked inside another box: It was full of shirts to go with the jeans. Then I peeked inside some of the other boxes: There were candy and nuts and bananas and bags of groceries. There was an enormous ham for baking, and canned vegetables and potatoes. There was pudding and Jell-O and cookies, pie filling and flour. There was a whole bag of laundry supplies and cleaning items. And there were five toy trucks and one beautiful little doll.

As I drove back through empty streets as the sun slowly rose on the most amazing Christmas Day of my life, I was sobbing with gratitude. And I will never forget the joy on the faces of my little ones that precious morning.

Yes, there were angels in Indiana that long-ago December. And they all hung out at the Big Wheel truck stop.

Only in souls...

Only in souls the Christ is brought to birth,
And there He lives and dies.

--Alfred Noyes

We should try to hold on...

We should try to hold on to the Christmas spirit, not just one day a year, but all 365.

--Mary Martin

Mankind is a great, an immense family...

Mankind is a great, an immense family... This is proved by what we feel in our hearts at Christmas.

--Pope John XXIII

CHRISTMAS is...

CHRISTMAS is C-hrist's H-istoric, R-emarkable I-ncarnation S-tory, T-elling M-essiah's A-waited S-alvation.

--Jose B. Cabajar

Make this Christmas count...

Make this Christmas count in the hearts and lives of others--it's not just a special time, but a special opportunity!

--Maria Fontaine

Dear Admiral McDonald

Author unknown

Dear Admiral McDonald:

This letter is a year late. Nevertheless, it is important that you receive it. Eighteen people have asked me to be sure to write to you.

Last year at Christmas time, my wife, three boys and I were in France, on our way from Paris to Nice. For five wretched days everything had gone wrong. Our hotels were tourist traps, our rented car broke down, we were irritable and restless.

On Christmas Eve, when we checked into a hotel in Nice, there was no Christmas spirit in our hearts. It was cold and raining when we went out to eat. We found a drab little cafe, shoddily decorated for the holiday.

Only five tables in the restaurant were occupied. There were two German couples, two French families and an American sailor by himself. In the corner a piano player listlessly played. I was too stubborn, too tired, and too miserable to leave.

I looked around and noticed that the other customers were eating in stony silence. The only person who seemed happy was the American sailor. He was writing a letter, smiling to himself.

My wife ordered our meal in French. The waiter brought us the wrong thing. I scolded my wife, she began to cry, and the boys defended her. Then on my left, at the table of one French family, the father slapped one of his children for some minor fault; the boy cried. On our right, the German wife berated her husband.

All of us were suddenly interrupted by an unpleasant blast of cold air. Through the door came an old French flower woman. She wore a dripping, tattered overcoat, and shuffled in on wet, rundown shoes. Carrying her basket of roses she went from table to table. “Flowers?”

No one bought any, and wearily she sat at a table between the sailor and us.

To the waiter she said: “Bowl of soup. I haven't sold a flower the whole afternoon.” To the piano player she said hoarsely: “Can you imagine, Joseph, ordering only a bowl of soup on Christmas Eve?”

Joseph pointed to his empty tipping plate. The young sailor finished his meal, and got up to leave. Putting on his coat, he walked over to the flower woman's table.

“Happy Christmas,” he said smiling, and picking out two roses, he said, “How much are these?”

“Two francs, Monsieur.”

Pressing one of the flowers into the letter he had written, he handed the woman a 20-franc note.

“I'll have to get some change, Monsieur,” she said.

“No ma'am,” said the sailor, kissing the ancient cheek. “This is my Christmas present to you.”

Straightening up, he came to our table, holding the other rose in front of him. “Sir,” he said to me, “may I present this to your beautiful daughter?”

In one quick motion he gave the rose to my wife, wished us a Merry Christmas and departed.

Everyone had stopped eating. Everyone had been watching the sailor. Everyone was sitting in thoughtful silence.

A few seconds later, Christmas exploded through the restaurant like a bomb. The old flower woman jumped up waving her 20-franc note. Hobbling out into the middle of the room she did a jig, shouting to the piano player: “Joseph, my Christmas present! You shall have a feast too!”

With sudden enthusiasm the piano player began to play “Good King Wenceslas,” beating the keys with magic hands, nodding his head to the rhythm. My wife waved her rose in time to the music. She was radiant, looking twenty years younger. The tears had left her eyes. She began to sing and our three sons joined in, bellowing loudly.

The Germans jumped on the chairs and began singing. The waiter embraced the flower woman. Waving their arms, they sang in French. The French man who had slapped the boy beat a rhythm with his fork against a bottle and the lad climbed on his lap. Then the owner of the restaurant started singing “The First Noel,” and we all joined in, half of us crying as we sang.

People crowded in from the street until many were standing. The walls shook, as hands and feet kept time to the rousing Yuletide carols. A few hours before eighteen people had been spending a miserable evening in a shoddy restaurant. It ended up being our happiest Christmas Eve ever.

This, Admiral McDonald, is what I'm writing you about. As top man in the Navy you should know about the very special gift that the U.S. Navy gave to my family, to me, and to the other people in that French restaurant. Because your young sailor had Christmas spirit in his soul, he released the love and joy that had been smothered within us. He gave us Christmas.

Thank you, sir, very much.

My idea of Christmas...

My idea of Christmas, whether old-fashioned or modern, is very simple: loving others. Come to think of it, why do we have to wait for Christmas to do that?

--Bob Hope

Christmas is for love

Author unknown

Christmas is for love. It is for joy, for giving and sharing, for laughter, for reuniting with family and friends, for tinsel and brightly decorated packages. But mostly, Christmas is for love.

I had not believed this until a small elf-like student with wide-eyed innocence and soft rosy cheeks gave me a wondrous gift one Christmas. Mark was an 11-year-old orphan who lived with his aunt, a bitter middle-aged woman greatly annoyed with the burden of caring for her dead sister's son. She never failed to remind young Mark, if it hadn't been for her generosity, he would be a vagrant homeless waif. Still, with all this scolding and chilliness at home, he was a sweet and gentle child.

I had not noticed Mark particularly until he began staying after class each day (at the risk of arousing his aunt's anger, I later found) to help me straighten up the classroom. We did this quietly and comfortably, not speaking much, but enjoying the solitude of that hour of the day. When we did talk, Mark spoke mostly of his mother. Though he was quite small when she died, he remembered a kind, gentle, loving woman, who always spent much time with him.

As Christmas drew nearer, however, Mark failed to stay after school each day. I looked forward to his coming and when, as the days passed and he continued to scamper hurriedly from the room after class, I stopped him one afternoon and asked why he no longer helped me in the room. I told him how I had missed him, and his large gray eyes lit up eagerly as he replied, "Did you really miss me?" I explained how he had been my best helper.

"I was making you a surprise," he whispered confidentially. "It's for Christmas." With that, he became embarrassed and dashed from the room. He didn't stay after school anymore after that.

Finally came the last school day before Christmas. Mark crept slowly into the room late that afternoon with his hands concealing something behind his back. "l have your present," he said timidly when I looked up. "I hope you like it." He held out his hands, and there lying in his small palms was a tiny wooden box.

"It's beautiful, Mark. Is there something in it?" I asked, opening the top to look inside.

"Oh, you can't see what's in it," he replied, "and you can't touch it or taste it or feel it. But Mother always said it makes you feel good all the time, warm on cold nights, and safe when you're all alone."

I gazed into the empty box. "What is it, Mark," I asked gently, "that will make me feel so good?"

"It's love," he whispered softly, "and Mother always said it's best when you give it away." And he turned quietly and left the room.

So now I keep a small box made of wood on the piano in my living room and only smile as inquiring friends raise quizzical eyebrows when I explain to them that there is love in it.

Yes, Christmas is for gaiety, mirth, and song--for good and wondrous gifts. But mostly, Christmas is for love.

A little smile...

A little smile, a word of cheer,
A bit of love from someone near,
A little gift from one held dear,
Best wishes for the coming year--
These make a Merry Christmas!

--John Greenleaf Whittier

The joy of brightening other lives...

The joy of brightening other lives, bearing each others' burdens, easing other's loads and supplanting empty hearts and lives with generous gifts becomes for us the magic of Christmas.

--W.C. Jones

He who has not Christmas...

He who has not Christmas in his heart will never find it under a tree.

--Roy L. Smith

Peace on earth will come to stay...

Peace on earth will come to stay,
When we live Christmas every day.

--Helen Steiner Rice

A Perfect Mistake

Author unknown

Mother's father worked as a carpenter. On this particular day, he was building some crates for the clothes his church was sending to some orphanage in China for Christmas. On his way home, he reached into his shirt pocket to find his glasses, but they were gone. When he mentally replayed his earlier actions, he realized what must have happened: The glasses had slipped out of his pocket unnoticed and fallen into one of the crates, which he had nailed shut. His brand-new glasses were heading for China!

The Great Depression of the 1930s was at its height in the U.S. and Grandpa had six children. He had spent $20 for those glasses that very morning. He was upset by the thought of having to buy another pair. “It's not fair,” he told God as he drove home in frustration. “I've been very faithful in giving of my time and money to Your work, and now this.”

Several months later, the director of the orphanage was on furlough in the United States. He wanted to visit all the churches that supported him in China, so he came to speak one Sunday at my grandfather's small church in Chicago. The missionary began by thanking the people for their faithfulness in supporting the orphanage.

“But most of all,” he said, “I must thank you for the glasses you sent last year. You see, the Communists had just swept through the orphanage, destroying everything, including my glasses. I was desperate. Even if I had the money, there was simply no way of replacing those glasses. Along with not being able to see well, I experienced headaches every day, so my coworkers and I were much in prayer about this. Then your Christmas crates arrived. When my staff removed the covers, they found a pair of glasses lying on top.”

The missionary paused long enough to let his words sink in. Then, still gripped with the wonder of it all, he continued: “Folks, when I tried on the glasses, it was as though they had been custom-made just for me! I want to thank you for being a part of that.”

The people listened, happy for the miraculous glasses. However, they thought the missionary surely must have confused their church with another. There were no glasses on their list of items to be sent overseas.

But sitting quietly in the back, with tears streaming down his face, an ordinary carpenter realized the Master Carpenter had used him in an extraordinary way.

It is good to be children...

It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.

--Charles Dickens

Our hearts grow tender...

Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.

--Laura Ingalls Wilder

The giving of gifts...

The giving of gifts is not something man invented. God started the giving spree when he gave a gift beyond words, the unspeakable gift of His Son.

--Robert Flatt