Christmas is About More Than Gifts

  Good morning, and Merry Christmas Eve Day to you.

  Christmas Eve is the main event of Christmas at our house, much more so than Christmas morning.

  My wife is busy preparing goodies days in advance – cookies, pie, homemade fudge … The entire clan gathers in the living room to open gifts. It’s a tradition that began with her family when she was growing up. Christmas Eve was the big deal for them, too. Christmas Day was an afterthought. 

  The Christmas Eve gift opening at our house reminds me of Christmas morning at the Parker household in the movie “A Christmas Story.” Ribbons and wrappers flying, squeals and peals of laughter … chaos.

  Christmas, of course, isn’t just about gifts. More on that later.

  Selecting and purchasing Christmas gifts, as anyone who has done it is well aware, can be challenging, expensive, stressful. One year I was still roaming store aisles searching for gifts on Christmas Eve itself. You only do that once before vowing never, ever to do it again.

  With all that goes into buying and receiving gifts, it’s surprising that we may not remember some or any of the gifts we received the preceding Christmas. Do you remember what you got for Christmas last year? I don’t remember a single gift. Neither does my wife.

  Only one gift through all the years stands out, a gift remembered for life.

  I was a teenager at the time, smitten by rock and roll and saving up for my first good guitar. It was a slow process for a kid making a dollar an hour working summers on the end of a shovel. 

  My father and an uncle were partners in a company that installed lawn sprinkling systems. Dad figured that a job with the company would teach me the value of hard work. (It’s also possible that he couldn’t find anyone else willing to work that hard for a buck an hour.)

  I saved virtually every dollar made on that job, but when Christmas came around I was still $150 short of having enough for the guitar. My parents surprised me by making up the difference and giving it to me for Christmas. I sat and stared at it for a long time without taking it out of the case. It was almost too beautiful to touch. To this day, it remains the only Christmas gift I still remember.

  So maybe the gifts we stress over aren’t all that important. 

  More than any of the gifts I’ve received, a Christmas experience still stands out many years later. It was a Christmas Eve so vividly remembered that it’s as if it happened last year rather than decades ago. I’d have been eight or nine at the time.

  As Christmas Eves go, it was almost perfect. My great grandmother had come to stay with us for one of her extended visits, and the house was filled with the aroma of her baking. Dad was busy in the kitchen, making a batch of his signature Tom and Jerrys. Lights glittered on the tree, a fire crackled in the fireplace and George Melachrino’s “Christmas Joy,” still my favorite Christmas album, played softly on the stereo.

 The only thing missing was snow.

  That December, much like this December, had been unusually dry. Hardly any snow at all. Dreams of a white Christmas appeared to be that and only that – dreams.

  Until Christmas Eve. No snow had fallen that day or most of the evening. We had a tradition in our family of opening one gift on Christmas Eve, the others on Christmas morning. We’d had dinner, opened our gifts, and still no snow. Then, a little before bedtime, I looked out the dining room window and couldn’t believe what was happening.

  Snow was coming down so hard it was if it were making up for lost time the rest of the month. I stood and watched, wonder-struck, as it fell in the yellow glow of the old-fashioned streetlight on our corner.

 The flakes looked to be as big as quarters. Instead of diminishing, as snowstorms often do in the valley, this one intensified. Snowflakes fell, and fell, and fell. Lawns disappeared, streets glistened; curbs and sidewalks, even cars were buried. It happened quickly, a no-nonsense storm, and it was a thing of transcendent  beauty.

  The snow was still falling at bedtime, promising snowballs and snow forts on Christmas day. 

   I’ll never forget the feeling of watching a perfectly timed and extraordinarily beautiful snowstorm on that Christmas Eve. It was special enough to be remembered for a lifetime. All these years later, when countless gifts have been forgotten, I’m still grateful for having experienced it.

  It isn’t the shopping or the gifts or the goodies that embody the spirit of Christmas. The spirit of Christmas is something deeper, something that gives us, for a brief but magical time, the feeling that cares and conflicts are on hold and all is well with the world.

  My wish to you is that you’ve known or will know the sort of wonder I felt on that long-ago Christmas Eve. That was a gift to be  remembered.

  Merry Christmas.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.