Once Upon a Christmas Read online

  “One day, returning from Beijing after having sold our vegetables at the market place, I was approached by a vendor who offered me this necklace for nearly all the money I had been paid for our crop. I thought it the most beautiful gift in all of China for the most beautiful wife in all of China. The vision of it around her lovely neck made me forget our poverty and the necessities for which the money was intended. So I bought the necklace with its many colored beads and presented it to her as a symbol of my love.

  “She took it from me and in a fit of temper threw it back at me as the purchase of a fool who had spent money needed for the coming child. Angry words were exchanged, and in a like fit of temper, I left our home, vowing never to return.

  “I went to Beijing, found work and stubbornly refused to return to our small farm. Such was the pride of a foolish young man.”

  At this point Grandfather handed the necklace to Su. She took it, looked at it closely, then handed it back to Grandfather, who continued.

  “Neighbors brought word to me of her hardships, but my pride was unrelenting. Then a trusted friend sought me out and told me a child had been born, my son.

  “The woman is very ill,” he said. “You must go quickly, for the child’s sake.”

  “Like lightning hitting my brain, I realized what misery my pride and arrogance had caused. On my bicycle I raced out of the city to the cottage I had raced away from months earlier. There I found our son, held by a neighbor. My wife was in our bed, asleep and breathing softly.

  “I took the child and with him cradled in my arms went to the bed. She opened her eyes.

  “And in those eyes there was no longer anger, only love; and she saw the same in mine. We professed our love, begged each other’s forgiveness, and absolved each other for how stupidly we had behaved. Together, we named the child Xiang, and I laid him on the pillow next to her head. She gazed at our son lovingly and after a brief moment closed her eyes. She never opened them again, for a blood clot had broken loose and been carried to her heart. Xiang and I were left alone.” He stopped.

  Su was stunned and filled with compassion for the old man before her. She moved to his side and took his limp hand in hers. “The blood clot was not of your making. You raised a fine son who brings honor to your family. You had your wife’s forgiveness. Why do you still torment yourself?”

  “Because,” Grandfather answered, “no man is truly forgiven until he forgives himself. As my love was being prepared for burial, I removed a green bead, gold-embossed, the only one of its kind on the necklace, and placed it in her hand. The absence of this bead from the necklace, I vowed, would serve as my reminder that my heart could never again be complete.” He looked again at the necklace in his hand and fingered it once more. Then he slipped it into the pocket of his new robe.

  “Go to bed now, Grandfather Liu,” Su spoke gently. “It is nearly Christmas morning, a time when miracles happen for children and those who are able to be children again, if only for a day. Perhaps you will awaken with a lighter heart, on the wings of the Spirit of Christmas. You have shared your burden with one who will share it with no one else. I pray for the Spirit of Christmas to fill the empty place in your heart.” With that, she left for her own bed next to her husband.

  Children all around the world were up early Christmas morning, and Li and Sam were no different. Each ran to his or her pile of gifts and removed the wrapping as a hurricane scatters anything not bolted down. Xiang had a gift for Su, and she, one for him. Grandfather smiled at the Christmas commotion, and indeed, his mood seemed lighter.

  When all the gifts had seemingly been opened, Li spotted a small box nearly hidden under the back branches of the blue spruce. She dug it out and held it up for all to see.

  The box was wrapped in paper decorated with dragons’ heads and Chinese characters. It was yellow and blue with a traditional Christmas name tag attached. The tag, read by Li, was addressed to Grandfather Liu. She hurriedly moved to his chair and offered it to him.

  The old man was startled and muttered, “It must be a mistake. I have my new robe.”

  “Open it, Grandfather,” Li pleaded. “It has your name on it.”

  Obediently, he did. And inside was a green bead, embossed with gold, a perfect match for the one that had at one time graced the necklace now in his robe pocket. “But how can this be?” he asked. “I …”

  Quickly, Su moved to his side. “What a beautiful green bead!” she exclaimed. “It looks to me to be a match for the beads on the necklace I have seen when I straightened your room. Do see if it is.”

  Grandfather slowly lifted the necklace from the pocket of his robe. “Ah,” Su said. “It is perfect for the necklace, and I see the necklace has no other bead of this color.”

  “But who gave it?” Xiang asked. “Is there no name on the tag?”

  Su looked carefully. “Sorry, no name. It must have been delivered by the Spirit of Christmas,” she laughed. “Accept it as that, Grandfather Liu.”

  That afternoon, Grandfather restrung the necklace so that the new bead was at the mid-point of the other beads; and before the evening meal he fastened the necklace around Li’s neck. “Your grandmother would want it so,” he said. “Let us say no more of it,” he smiled. “Now I, too, have the Christmas Spirit.” Everyone laughed, except Sam who was asleep in his highchair.

  As Xiang and Su were preparing for bed, Xiang asked for an explanation. “Why the bead? And where did you get it? I know it was you. I recognized the paper from the packaging our fortune cookies come in. What’s the mystery?”

  “You are right,” Su confessed. “It was my gift to your father. But please, let him think whatever he likes about where it came from. You saw how it pleased him.”

  “Yes, but how the perfect match for the necklace? And why did he have the necklace? And why give it to Li?”

  Su explained. “Before my father, Henry, came to America, he was a vendor of odds and ends on the streets of Beijing. He brought a box of the jewelry he sold in China to America, thinking he would sell it on the streets here. We have a dozen or more of those necklaces in a box in our attic. One of them now is missing a green bead embossed with gold.”

  “But …” Xiang paused. “What else?”

  “The rest is your father’s business, and if he chooses to tell us, he will. For now, enough has been said. Go to sleep, and may the Spirit of Christmas give us all pleasant dreams.”

  And the Spirit of Christmas did just that. It found each room and blessed all in their beds with good dreams, especially Grandfather Liu, who saw a beautiful woman wearing a necklace with a gold-embossed green bead that sparkled like sand on a sunny beach.

  He took her outstretched hand and smiled at her. She smiled back with eyes of love and forgiveness. And the Spirit of Christmas smiled also.

  Christmas Light

  IT’S DECEMBER 7, 1941, A Sunday afternoon. You and Pa are listening to the radio. You aren’t paying much attention as you play with your Lincoln Logs on the flowered-linoleum covered floor. You are building a fort, a U.S. Cavalry outpost. A place to which the Lone Ranger and Tonto are racing to report the Apaches are on another warpath. Just like the episode you saw in the serial at the Fox Theater yesterday—just before the main feature with Abbot and Costello, who made you laugh so hard you almost peed your pants.

  “Listen,” Pa says. “Everybody listen! The president’s talkin’!”

  “FDR?” Ma asks from the kitchen.

  “Who else?” Pa answers.

  And the president talks about the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor that morning.

  “What the hell.” Pa says in almost a whisper. “Damned if we ain’t at war.”

  Then, one after another, all the boys in the neighborhood go off to war in France or England or Italy or to islands in the South Pacific nobody ever heard of. And Pa gets a deferment because now the factory he works in is making parts for submarines instead of for Ford cars. He wants to go fight “Japs” and “Nazis” too, but he’s fo
reman of an assembly line and is “indispensable” for training and supervising the women stepping in for the men.

  And a year later, you are peddling newspapers on Bill Gottshalk’s old route. Billy got killed in France, a place he never thought he’d get to see. “At least he got to see Paris,” his ma says to a neighbor who stops by when she sees the flag with the gold star in Gottshalk’s window.

  All along your paper route flags are hanging in windows, most with blue stars. Here and there, flags with gold stars are hanging. The women who sadly but proudly hung the flags with gold stars are called Gold Star Mothers and ride in the newest cars in town for all the parades. You know most of them, and you remember their boys who played football and basketball on the high school teams.

  A lot of things have changed because of the war. Rubber has been replaced with canvas for your overshoes. The Big Three are making planes and warships instead of cars. Lucky Strike Green went to war. In the movies cowboys and Indians shooting each other have been replaced by American soldiers shooting Japs and Nazis. And the Lone Ranger serial has been replaced by The Eyes and Ears of the World with mostly pictures of the war and the war effort, narrated by Lowell Thomas, all for ten cents. Food is scarce and gasoline is scarcer—both are rationed, and a huge black market for ration stamps is flourishing. In one way or another everybody has joined or been forced into the war effort.

  You sell defense stamps to the customers on your Eagle Star route. Ten or twenty-five cents apiece, with a free book to paste them in. When your book has eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents worth of stamps, you can trade it in for a war bond for which the government promises to pay you twenty-five dollars in ten years. Every Friday you dismount your bike, knock on doors, and collect twenty cents for the paper. Then you punch the date on a card so you can’t try to collect twice, or your customers can’t say they paid when they didn’t. After that you ask, “Any defense stamps this week, Mrs. Gottshalk?”

  All this collecting takes place in the doorway or just inside the house, so you can always hear the radio playing. Radios play all day long, just in case news of the war comes on. Otherwise, it’s just music. You hear so much radio music, you know all the words to songs like G.I. Jive, To Each His Own, Lili Marlene, Ole Buttermilk Sky, Elmer’s Tune, I’ll Be Seeing You and White Cliffs of Dover. And nobody misses the evening news with Walter Winchell’s staccato delivery and a telegraph key clicking in the background. Or Gabriel Heatter with, “Ah, there’s bad news tonight,” or “good news” if the war is going well.

  Your customers leaf through the paper to find Ernie Pyle’s column reporting news from the front. And his two cartoon characters, Willie and Joe, crouched in a foxhole, all muddy and wet with rain pouring down on their GI helmets. “You know, Willie,” Joe says. “It does sound like rain on a tin roof.”

  The times are dark and cloudy, but Christmas, like the eastern sky, always brings light. It would be downright unpatriotic not to celebrate Christmas, because celebrating Christmas is one of the things we are fighting to preserve.

  The stores are a little short of toys to buy, but Santa’s workshop and elves always come through with something. Why, just take a look at yourself:

  A girl (or boy)

  Searching for that special toy.

  The tree is trimmed.

  Its lights are bright.

  Can’t you see that Christmas sight?

  It’s long ago

  When you were young.

  Your grown-up song is yet unsung.

  Hear the bells?

  It’s Christmas day.

  You’ve asked for toys, so you can play.

  Santa’s come!

  Don’t you see

  All the presents ’round your tree?

  Of course you see them. Each giftwrapped in tissue paper—white mostly, but some green and some red. And tied with colored string. A name tag on each so you don’t unwrap a doll instead of a Roy Rogers gun and holster set. Or a dump truck instead of a mirror, brush, and comb set. Not even war can stop Christmas from coming or Pa from buying Ma another bottle of Evening in Paris perfume.

  You rush to find which presents are yours. Strings pop, tissue paper floats to the floor and settles in multicolored drifts. You open the gift you wanted most. Santa read your letter. What a merry Christmas. And you forget about the war.

  Time for breakfast. Always something special for Christmas morning. Waffles maybe, with no limit on the maple syrup. Eggs and ham if you know a farmer nearby. Chances are Mother has a fresh-baked stolen fruitcake or kuchen. And, of course, decorated sugar cookies shaped like stars, bells and wreaths. A lot of sugar and butter ration stamps had to be spent for those.

  Off to church now, without Pa ’cause he went to midnight services. Every year you hear the same story. You know it by heart: A baby born in a stable. But not just any baby. This one is God Himself. No heat in the stable, so the animals keep Him warm. Angels in the sky—Hark the Herald Angels Sing. A huge star in the sky spotted by three kings who trace it to the stable. We Three Kings of Orient Are, a virgin birth. “Round yon virgin, mother and child.” It’s years before you know what “virgin birth” means, but you take comfort in it all. It’s Christmas, and Christmas requires faith—faith in the preacher, faith in Santa Claus, faith in the rightness of war. Oh Come All Ye Faithful.

  Church gets long

  Try not to sleep.

  Eyelids heavy.

  Sinking deep.

  Pinch yourself.

  Give a shake.

  You felt that pinch.

  Now stay awake!

  “Let us pray,” your pastor says, “for our men and women in uniform, in Germany, France, Italy, Iwo Jima. On land or sea or in the air. Fighting, offering their lives so we may live free. As Jesus died to save us from eternal damnation.” You bow your head and ask God to stop the war—please. Because it’s Christmas, and Jesus is the Prince of Peace. And the war is screwing up everyone’s life. Amen.

  Christmas afternoon and evening are for playing games, visiting, shelling and eating nuts, sucking on hard candy, and gobbling down the apples and oranges Santa left in your stocking. The evening radio is all music and static, maybe a little news. Eddie Cantor, Fibber McGee and Molly, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, and Red Skelton, your favorite programs are not on Christmas night. It’s a peaceful time. Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie. The war doesn’t exist. You’re getting bored when someone knocks on the front door.

  Everyone runs to open it, thinking Grandma and Grandpa are finally here with their gifts. But it’s Ellen Kramer with bad news. Rusty Schmidt’s plane was shot down in the South Pacific. Rusty was class salutatorian and a hell of a basketball player. “God rest ye merry gentlemen.”

  And so it goes until the war ends August 15, 1945. Mrs. Myers, who owns the corner grocery store, is crying and telling everybody the war’s over when you stop in there to buy some penny candy to eat on your paper route. Another war to end all wars has just ended. No more war next Christmas! Peace on earth. Good will toward men.

  So World War II is ended, but our story is not. We, you and I, have a beginning and a middle, but no ending. Here we are in the year 1945 with a Christmas story to finish. Any ideas? It has to be uplifting. Nobody wants a Christmas story with a sad ending.

  As I think about it, this is going to be a tough story to end.

  So maybe we should settle for an optimistic conclusion. One that ties it all together. Let’s try one. How about something like this:

  So World War II ended. But it was not the war to end all wars. We brought the curtain down, but it was to rise again and again—and again. The actors and sets changed, but the final curtain was never final. There has always been another war waiting in the wings. Yet each final curtain brought hope and faith that it would be the last war story on the stage. And Christmas helps us keep that hope and faith alive.

  Christmas is a light that even war has not extinguished. Even in wartime kids write letters to Santa Claus
and sit on his knee in department stores. Charity is requested and given on street corners with bells ringing for those needing physical and spiritual salvation. We sing Silent Night, Holy Night in many languages in many countries. We exchange gifts, shell nuts, and peel oranges. We celebrate the birth of Jesus, whether we believe Jesus to be the Son of God or a wise teacher with an enduring message of faith and hope.

  And in our Christmas celebrations, religious or secular, our spirits join those of the heralding angels for a midnight service, a party, a meal, a day with the family, or a week without school. Hark! The herald angels sing … and so do we. The Christmas sunbeam somehow breaks through the darkest cloud, and we believe that someday we will sing We do have peace on earth and goodwill toward men.

  So why don’t you and I end this journey to the past with the conclusion that wars may come and wars may go, but Christmas is always coming with an illumination that never fails to penetrate the darkness.

  The Day Before Christmas Vacation

  TO THE PEOPLE she passed on the street, she was just a plump, African-American woman, stylishly dressed, on her way to some job or another on the fringe of one of the poorer neighborhoods of South Florida.

  She became more clearly defined when she turned on to the broad sidewalk filled with colorfully dressed, backpacking high school students headed into Sanberado High School, many from the large and crowded student parking lot on the north side of the the old stucco building in need of fresh paint.

  The woman reached the first of the seventeen cement steps leading to a wide and open door and paused to catch her breath, while younger and slimmer bodies whizzed past her like commuters at Penn Station dashing for the 5:37 to Newark. For twenty-two years she had climbed these steps and been jostled all the way to her classroom at the very end of the hallway and adjacent to the student parking lot. The administrator in charge of classroom assignment always gave her that room so that her students’ sometimes noisy eruptions would be confined to the same area as the noisy eruptions from jalopies with leaky mufflers. She taught remedial reading at Sanberado High. Her students’ frustrations with their failures often burst their emotional bubbles, allowing loud, embarrassed laughter, howls of protest, and the babble of tomfoolery to escape. Among these teenagers were dabblers in alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, prostitution and pimping. The hard core of those who were users, sellers, and buyers had years ago stopped coming to school.