So, tomorrow is Christmas Eve. At our home the tree is finally up and decorated, thanks to the ladies of the house, and packages will start flowing under it momentarily. There's just a bit more shopping to do today while the baking starts in earnest.
Better writers than this one are thinking about Christmas gifts, too. Here's wise Peggy Noonan on the true spirit of gift-giving. She remembers a miraculous and unexpected present when she was seven years old, and its importance.
The joy of receiving a happy gift and being grateful for it and excited by it opened up my mind. It cracked open my imagination and let a truth that seemed like magic in.Is there a moral to this memory? What it taught me, what I remember all these years later, is that everyone likes gifts but no one is more affected by their power than children. They are susceptible to wonder. A child can look at a red toy car in the red-green glow of Christmas tree lights and imagine an entire lifetime. A child can play with a new doll and smell good things being cooked and hear sweet music and it can make that child imagine that life is good, which gives her a template for good, a category for good; it helps her know good exists. This knowledge comes in handy in life; those who do not receive it, one way or another, are sadder than those who do.
We have two more days before Christmas. Remember the soldiers and sailors, remember ma and pa, remember your friends but especially remember the kids.
Read the whole thing. Then go read Tony Woodlief's brilliant tale of a nearly fruitless quest to buy toy guns for his sons.
He led me to the back, where he had assembled -- and I am not making this up -- gun racks to hold all the toy armaments. If Santa ever needed to assemble a commando strike force, this could be his armory.Posted by Alan at December 23, 2004 02:27 PMI almost cried. Here was every kind of toy pistol and rifle imaginable, made of real wood and metal. Single-barrel, double-barrel, over-and-under, even blunderbuss. Sighted, scoped, with and without shoulder strap, pump action, bolt action, underlever cocking . . . (Insert Tim Allen gorilla sound here).