EDITOR’S CORNER
For the first time, I took my grandson, two-and-one-half-year-old Elliott Brown, to a mall.
They say malls are dying and I suppose it’s true if you count the ones which are still open and compare them to the way it used to be.
But this was Christmastime and that changes all the rules.
(I know, I know, Christmastime is pretty much any month ending in an “r”).
The gadgets with which they are enticing kids now, of course, are in a different universe than when I used to drool over the slot cars in Montgomery Wards at Capital Plaza in Austin.
Or when my son—Elliott’s dad—would light up seeing the skateboard stuff at Independence Center in suburban Kansas City when we would go visit my mom at Christmas.
But one thing has remained constant throughout those three experiences, spanning six decades.
Stores have changed, technology has changed, certainly I have changed. But you know what’s still the same?
The magic when you mix kids and Christmas.
I thought, while pushing Elliott around in the mall’s big plastic stroller, with which Eisenhower could have landed in Normandy, just how little had changed.
Because I was watching kids’ faces, children I could swear I had seen before, even if I hadn’t, while listening to music I certainly have heard before.
Silent Night, Rudolph, Joy to the World. Yes, joy.
They call this the Christmas season, and I can understand that, but “season” doesn’t go far enough. It affects us more deeply than just being a month or so on the calendar.
There’s a way in which every new Christmas is all Christmases. It defeats time. It plays tricks with mortality.
Have you ever felt closer at Christmas with someone who has gone on? Bet you have. I certainly have.
We remember Christmases of the past and somehow they—the Christmas and the person—live again.
There’s a reason why we gather to watch the same television shows and movies every Christmas, whether it’s Ralphie “shooting his eye out” or Charlie Brown and his pathetic, glorious little tree, or Jimmy Stewart finding out just how wonderful his life really is.
And think: “I used to watch this with . . . . . . .” And somehow they’re still here, enjoying it with me again.
Scroogelike, we can go back to those old glass bubble lights on a real tree, fragrant with cedar, as a little boy wonders if his preacher dad will ever get through reading the second chapter of Luke so he can open presents.
Back to holding hands with his first “girlfriend” as we—oops, I said “we”; oh, well you had it figured out, didn’t you?—caroled with Pearl Rinn’s fourth-grade class from Rockdale Elementary. Mrs. Rinn sure loved the song “Silver Bells.”
Back to sneaking my wife’s 90-pound, bulky, “big present” into the basement of a house far from here under her very eyes, and her not even noticing it.
Back to awakening one Christmas morning and finding my tiny step-daughter coloring under the tree and softly singing “Silent Night” to herself as she waited for the rest of the family to awaken.
I can close my eyes and be in 2018. Or 1998, or 1958 or any “8” you care to bring up.
But, when is it, really?
It’s Christmas of course.
In the words of poet John Keats: “That is all ye know, and all ye need to know.”
Merry Christmas. All of them.
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