Christmas Spirit

In days past, Christmas has been a big event in my family… making homemade Christmas cards, baking and decorating cookies, wrapping presents, putting candles in the windows, and trimming the Christmas tree. With the intervening years and miles, it has become more difficult to share the holiday season. So a few years ago when my bachelor son Jeff remarked on the phone that it just didn’t feel like Christmas to him, Bob and I decided to do something about it. We put together a box of what we called “Christmas Spirit” and sent it to him. Inside the box was a wreath for his front door, a Christmas music CD, a box of Christmas cards for him to send out, our family’s traditional sugar cookies, and a small fully decorated artificial Christmas tree. Just thinking about what should go in the Christmas Spirit Box, brought a smile to our own faces as well.

This holiday season we are many hundreds of miles from family, and though the scene outside the cabin window resembles those on Christmas cards, we have not thought much about Christmas. Food and warmth have been our priorities. I have baked no cookies, sent no cards, done no shopping. In other words – no Christmas Spirit – that is, until I received this cryptic e-mail from my son… “Our tree is on youtube." So I went to YouTube, typed in the password and there was a video showing the little artificial Christmas tree that we had sent to him five years ago. The camera zoomed in on the brightly lit tree, a heart shaped ornament that I had made, and ended with Jeff saying “Merry Christmas.” I guess the Christmas spirit never really goes away. It is like love… what we send out has a way of finding its way back.

... P. L. Morningstar
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