Ghosts of Christmas Past

18 December 2009.

A week to go before Christmas. For lots of folks this year, it's going to be a lean one.

I shot this picture of my wife's quarter collection partly because the old jar holds special memories for me, things from my childhood. It holds other memories too. Ghosts of Christmas past.

It amazes me even today how special Christmas was each year at our house. The house was always decorated with a tree. Some years I think there may have been some modest lights around the big picture window. The house was filled with the great smells of Mom's Christmas cookies, pies, and other cooking. It couldn't have been easy, especially as large as our family was, to always make sure the family traditions were upheld. I know there had to be times when it would have been easier to just blow it all off, buy a few presents, and be done with it all.

That wasn't what Christmas was about though, not in our house. Christmas was more about family, being home, spending time together. I remember when, on my meager allowance and earnings from my paper route, I would fret and stew because I couldn't figure out how to get presents for the people I wanted to. It turns out, the presents weren't the point of it all. I suspect Mom and Dad felt the same way about Christmas - never enough money to get the things they'd like to get for everyone, and yet, somehow, they managed to make each one special.

As my older brothers and sisters moved away, I remember counting the days before they came "back home" for the holidays. Their leave or vacation was never long enough but that excitement and anticipation was every bit a part of making the holidays special.

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When was the last time you let your imagination take you away? Remember those days as a child when, left to your own imagination and a couple of beaten up old toys, you could spend hours and hours playing outside, in the dirt, digging up gravel and imagining they were really gold?

A few years ago I found these toys being offered through a mail order offer. When I first saw it, I thought, that would be a great set of toys to take across the street to the children's hospital and deliver to them for Christmas. For whatever reason, the toys never made it across the street. But they never got thrown out or put away either. For two Christmas' now, the boxes with these toys have sat on a shelf, unopened, other than to verify the contents. Something tells me that this is the year that they come out of the box, off the shelf, and find their way across the street.

With everything else going on with the economy this year, I cannot imagine having a child in the hospital, besides. So this weekend, I'll box them back up, maybe I'll wrap them, maybe I won't, and I'll deliver them to some little one who needs a chance to imagine things for him (or her)self. Something that doesn't involve shots, or tests, or chemo, or feeling bad...just a chance to imagine something better.