I am sitting here and it’s Christmas Eve remembering the wonderful Christmases I had when I was growing up. Christmas always centered around the Christ child. There was church and nativities and carols sung and candles glowing.\u00a0 Packages under the tree.\u00a0 Trips to the department store to see Santa.\u00a0 How I wish I could relive those years again. They were the best of times.\u00a0 I heard that some people don’t even think of Christmas as a Christian holiday anymore.\u00a0 I don’t know what they think it is or what the word Christmas means to them, but for me, it always is about Jesus.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Years ago I wrote a story about Christmas and I will share it with you now.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s as true as I can remember it.\u00a0 Most of it really happened and some may or may not, but that is for you to decide.<\/p>\n
Sleds and Santa Claus<\/p>\n
A heavy blanket of snow covered Daddy’s Indiana farm.\u00a0 Katie looked out the kitchen door and saw drifts of snow on the sidewalk and back porch.\u00a0 Daddy came in the back door stamping his feet and\u00a0 carrying an armload of wood to put in the big black iron stove that sat in the kitchen.\u00a0 As Katie ate her breakfast of hot sweet tea and cinnamon toast, she felt warm and cozy.\u00a0 Daddy sat at the head of the table and Mommy sat next to him.\u00a0 They were discussing what needed to be done that day on the farm<\/p>\n
Katie’s brother’s came down from the cold bedrooms upstairs.\u00a0\u00a0 The window in Katie’s room had had frost on the inside of it that morning and she had not wanted to leave her warm nest in her bed.<\/p>\n
“Hey! Let’s go sledding this afternoon,” cried Andy. That sounded like a great idea to all the children, but first all the chores had to be done before play.\u00a0 On a farm the livestock comes first and all the animals must be fed and watered before anything else.\u00a0 The eggs must be gathered before they froze in their nests.\u00a0 That was Katie’s job.\u00a0 Soon they were all bundled up\u00a0\u00a0 to go outdoors to do their chores.<\/p>\n
The cold wind whipped Katie’s face as she walked to the chicken house.\u00a0 Inside it was warm and the chickens began to cluck.\u00a0 Sometimes Katie would have to reach underneath a setting hen to take her eggs. The hen would not like this, but it had to be done.\u00a0 Eggs were never left to be hatched in the henhouse.\u00a0 Mommy used many of them in her baking each week ad the ones she didn’t use were carefully washed and crated and taken to the grocery store to be sold to the grocer for him to sell.\u00a0\u00a0 Mommy’s chicken eggs were especially good. They were fresh and the yolks were almost orange.\u00a0 That was because the chickens were allowed to scratch and peck outdoors and to eat a lot of different things like juicy bugs and worms besides the ground corn Daddy fed them.\u00a0 The grocer was always glad to get them.<\/p>\n
After a good hot midday meal, Katie and her brothers dressed in several layers of clothes and snow boots\u00a0and went out to Daddy’s workshop where the sleds were kept. They walked down the road to a hill owned by a neighbor, Mr. Bond.\u00a0 They climbed over the fence and trudged through the deep snow to the top of the hill.\u00a0 The first few times sledding down was not very good because the paths had to be made through the snow.\u00a0 After a few rides down the hill, it became slicker and slicker until you were absolutely flying!\u00a0 At the bottom of the hill was a little grove of tree that you had to steer your sled through.\u00a0 It was dangerous, but fun at the same time. Sometimes the neighbor boys, the Clevengers, would join in the fun. The boys would throw snowballs at one another as they slid down the hill.<\/p>\n
All too soon for Katie it was time to go back home.\u00a0 She was chilled to the bone but hadn’t noticed while she was sledding.\u00a0 Back in the warm house Mommy made hot chocolate and Daddy made popcorn balls.\u00a0 After all the exercise, it all tasted so good!<\/p>\n
Sometime in the winter,\u00a0 Daddy and Mommy would begin whispering to one another and hiding things from the children.\u00a0 It was Christmas time, one of the best times of the year for a child.\u00a0 Soon after Thanksgiving, the tree would be put up and decorated and Mommy would put up the red plastic wreaths with the red candles in the windows.\u00a0\u00a0 A plastic Santa riding a white reindeer and that\u00a0lit up was one of Katie’s favorite Christmas decorations.\u00a0 The nativity that Daddy had built was put in a place of honor where Katie would look at it every day.\u00a0 It had a blue lightbulb that gave the holy family a heavenly glow.<\/p>\n
Soon it was Christmas Eve and the children were all excited about Santa’s coming visit.\u00a0 The boys wanted Davy Crockett coonskin \u00a0hats and Katie wanted a doll.\u00a0 Her older sister, Joanne, wanted new clothes.\u00a0\u00a0 Katie wanted to stay up and see if Santa really was the one who brought the toys each Christmas.\u00a0 She begged Mommy to allow her to stay up if her sister stayed up with her\u00a0 “You may stay up, but you will be asleep before Santa gets here,”\u00a0 Mommy told her.<\/p>\n
That night Katie and Joanne each picked a chair to sleep in. With pillows and blankets, they settled in and\u00a0 prepared to stay up and see old St. Nick bring their presents.\u00a0 Everyone else went to bed and the house settled down into a deep, dark quiet.\u00a0 Not a thing was stirring.\u00a0 Katie was so excited.\u00a0\u00a0 She waited and waited until her eyelids became heavier and heavier.\u00a0 All at once there was a soft glow in the room.\u00a0 Katie rubbed her eyes because she could not believe what she was seeing. Right in front of her, so close she could have touched him was a short, round little man in a beautiful red woolen suit with the whitest fur trim. He was bent over putting something under the tree.\u00a0 It was Santa!\u00a0\u00a0 Katie was afraid that she might get in trouble for being there, but suddenly, the little man turned and looked right at her with his kind eyes and said, “Go back to sleep, honey.”\u00a0\u00a0 The next thing Katie knew she was waking up in her own bed. It was Christmas morning!<\/p>\n
The children all had to wait until Mommy and Daddy said it was okay to come down the stairs.\u00a0 When they did there was a mad dash to get to the Christmas tree and see what Santa had brought them.\u00a0 Katie doesn’t remember what she got that year, but she does remember it was the year she saw the real Santa Claus.<\/p>\n
Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.\u00a0 Bye.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am sitting here and it’s Christmas Eve remembering the wonderful Christmases I had when I was growing up. Christmas always centered around the Christ child. There was church and nativities and carols sung and candles glowing.\u00a0 Packages under the tree.\u00a0 Trips to the department store to see Santa.\u00a0 How I wish I could relive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith-and-religion","category-original-stories-by-kate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7701"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7708,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7701\/revisions\/7708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}