A Chicken Soup for the Soul Christmas Read online

  A CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SOUL Christmas

  A CHICKEN SOUP

  FOR THE SOUL

  Christmas

  Stories to Warm Your Heart and

  Share with Family During the Holidays

  Jack Canfield

  Mark Victor Hansen

  Backlist, LLC, a unit of

  Chicken Soup for the Soul Publishing, LLC

  Cos Cob, CT

  www.chickensoup.com

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 The Meaning of Christmas

  Christmas of My Dreams Cheryl Kirking

  Cheap Sax Robin Lee Shope

  A Closed Highway Opened Hearts Martha Ajango

  In Touch with My Inner Elf Loree Gold

  It’s the Simple Things Nancy Julien Kopp

  The First Christmas Sharon Melnicer

  The Christmas Doll Lizanne Southgate

  Connecting at Christmas Brenda Nixon

  The Focus Pauline Youd

  Dad’s Christmas Gift Kimberly Welsh

  The Gift of Time Carol (Pearce) Forrest as told to John Forrest

  The Nativity Story Amy Breitmann

  2 Through the Eyes of a Child

  Once a Year Lindy B Dolan

  Christmas in the Heart of a Child Lane Clayton as told to Joan Clayton

  A Little Angel’s Big Prayer Phyllis Ring

  Sarah’s Christmas Wish William Livers

  The Wish List Cheryl M Kremer

  Love for Tots Lynnea Bolin

  Tree of Thanks Brenda Nixon

  3 The Santa Files

  Memories of a Christmas Doll Ann Greenleaf Wirtz

  The Christmas Gift Raymond L Morehead

  Christmas at Six Kerry Germain

  Here Comes Santa Claus Carol Sue Hahn

  Dear Santa E M Hector

  Skinny Santa Elva Stoelers

  4 The Joy of Giving

  The Greatest Christmas Gift Bonnie Compton Hanson

  Christmas Spirit Lisa Beringer

  Just One Gift Ruth Spiro

  The Christmas Present Karen R Kilby

  Six Brown Eggs Jennie Spencer Baty

  The Treasured Gifts Come Without Ribbons or Bows Cookie Curci

  Papa’s Radio Cookie Curci

  Elvis Was Wrong! Sallie A Rodman

  A Christmas Moment Glorianne Swenson

  Christmas Lost—and Found Michele Ivy Davis

  The Doll in Burgundy Twill Emily King

  God and Santa Elsi Dodge

  The Twelve Days of Christmas Janet K Brennan

  The Gift of Normandy Beach Sheila S Hudson

  Caroling with the Coots Jennifer Martin

  Bearing Gifts Mimi Greenwood Knight

  5 Christmas Traditions

  Holiday Tale Michael Jordan Segal

  The World’s Biggest Table Helen Xenakis

  All I Want for Christmas Alice Malloy

  Milestones in the Boughs Dayle Allen Shockley

  Taking Down the Christmas Tree Dr Lyla Berry

  Christmas Found Lisa May

  Christmas Cards Debbie Farmer

  Paper Chains Tracy Schmid

  The Christmas Bagel Barbara Puccia

  6 Special Memories

  A Holiday to Remember Denise Peebles

  Ringing the Doorbells of Christmas Beth Copeland

  The Secret of Grandma’s Sugar Crock Cookie Curci

  The Twelve Years of Christmas Jeff S Hamilton

  The Last Christmas Michael Jordan Segal

  Unexpected Guests Lawrence D Elliott

  Oh, Christmas Tree Dahlynn McKowen

  The Morning Santa Came Jennifer Smith

  A Bottle of Cologne and a Handmade Handkerchief Isabel Bearman Bucher

  A Cell-Phone Christmas Judy Lockhart DiGregorio

  7 Insights and Lessons

  The Best Noël Mark Geiger

  Christmas Cookies Kimberly Ripley

  The Truth About Christmas Decorations Debbie Farmer

  Secret Santa Betty King

  A Secondhand Christmas Perry P Perkins

  I Remembered Anthony Valerie J Frost

  Christmas Memories in a Hospital Marilyn Phillips

  The Sound & Spirit of Christmas Through the Ears of a Deaf Woman John E Schlimm II

  The Matchless Gift Stephanie Ray Brown

  When Good Things Happen to Bad Children Judy Lockhart DiGregorio

  In-Law Survival Hot Line Mimi Greenwood Knight

  A Lesson in Forgiveness Kayleen Reusser

  Who Is Jack Canfield?

  Who Is Mark Victor Hansen?

  Contributors

  Permissions

  Introduction

  Remember when our eyes lit up with excited anticipation as our parents took the Christmas tree lights out of storage? These were not the small, delicate lights we see today, but the enamel-coated bulbs that eventually moved outdoors to decorate the front yard. December always made our souls sing with glee, while the snowy month softened the edges from even our strictest teachers. Some of our traditional friends celebrated St. Nicholas Day by placing a shoe outside their bedroom door—only to find candy in it the next morning! But the enviable kids owned the ultimate Christmas countdown device: the Advent Calendar. These glitter-sprinkled thin cardboard sheets contained tiny numbered windows that opened from December first through Christmas Eve. All twenty-four windows contained some illustrated symbol of the holiday—the largest window containing the manger of Jesus. The bigger the family, the more competition to open the last window on December twenty-fourth!

  We also remember some of the hard, challenging times when we needed to look beyond our painful moment and use resilient hearts to restore the joy of the holiday. Difficult as the season was, we still remember it with empathy and give to others who later walk in the same footsteps.

  This is Christmas at its best and most traditional flavor. Through the years, we’ve welcomed our friends and neighbors of different religions and ethnicities to come and help us celebrate our traditions—and, in the process, learned their holidays in many ways were not as different as our own! The meaning is the same. While we knew each other’s differences, we also accepted our friends’ cultures and customs as symbols of their love. It’s understandable why our eccentric neighbors down the road want to keep their Christmas tree up all year long—the feeling of happiness and hope needs to live through 365 days. Perhaps we should all keep up our own special “tree” of joy throughout the year, whether it’s one decorated with big bulbs to remind us of our blessed childhood, or one decorated with small, delicate lights that show us that the gifts and privileges we now possess are truly a miracle from a divine power that everyone can share. We hope the enclosed stories are shared with family and friends during the holidays.

  1

  THE

  MEANING OF

  CHRISTMAS

  Oh, Christmas isn’t just a day. It’s a

  frame of mind . . . and that’s what’s been

  changing. That’s why I’m glad I’m here.

  Maybe I can do something about it.

  Kris Kringle, Miracle on 34th Street

  Christmas of My Dreams

  The Christmas cookies are all frosted,

  the gingerbread men have purple hair,

  And ’cause little hands can only reach so high,

  the top half of the tree is quite bare!

  But the bottom half sparkles with tinsel,

  and foil stars and paper chains,

  And along with the gifts the Wise Men bring

  are three nickels and two candy canes.

  Although it’s true our money’s tighter than ever,

  our love just keep
s on growing, it seems,

  And I couldn’t ask for anything more,

  this is the Christmas of my dreams.

  I used to have such great expectations

  about Christmas and just how it should be,

  With the picture-perfect table of goodies

  and lots of presents under the tree.

  Although I still love the tinsel and glitter,

  the scent of pine and songs in the air,

  When all’s said and done, what matters most

  is the Christmas love that all of us share.

  Although our Christmas may not be very fancy,

  like the ones you see in magazines,

  I wouldn’t trade it for anything,

  this is the Christmas of my dreams.

  So let’s each count our blessings, and thank our God above,

  As we celebrate this season

  of the greatest gift of love.

  Our Christmas may not be very fancy,

  like the ones you see in magazines,

  But I couldn’t ask for anything more,

  this is the Christmas of my dreams.

  Cheryl Kirking

  Cheap Sax

  We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

  Thornton Wilder

  I attend garage sales on weekends. It’s called therapy— my respite from teaching middle school five days a week. I allot myself forty dollars when I foray into yard-sale heaven. Always loaded with hope, I salivate to find something I can turn a good profit on by selling it on eBay. I’m princess la-de-da. Just weeks before Christmas, I found an ad in the classifieds for an insidemoving sale. My dear husband cautioned me to be extra careful with my choices. After all, our daughter’s college loan was due, and it was the season of gift giving. Extra money would sure come in handy right now, and we couldn’t afford to waste a penny.

  Cold rain hammered down on my car and turned narrow streets into icy waterways. The windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the downpour, making it hard to see anything beyond the front of my car. This was good because the weather was apt to keep my competitors home today. I was like Santa when it came to garage sales—no storm or cold of winter could keep me from my appointed rounds.

  I parked right in front of the house. The front door was open as if to say, “Come in, come in, and buy my treasures.” Blessed me, I was the second person to cross the threshold. Under a pile of old bedspreads in the back bedroom, I opened a case and found a shiny saxophone. It had a beautiful engraving of a woman on it, and I soon learned it was not only vintage but in pristine condition to boot. It was mine for twenty dollars.

  Not familiar with the value of instruments, I called my husband to do a quick search on eBay to find out what they were going for. No way could I afford to make a financial mistake and end up with another white elephant to store in my shed. It was crowded enough in there as it was.

  “Why are you calling me on your cell phone? We are out of minutes, so this call is expensive,” Rick complained.

  “Just look, please.”

  A sigh. Over the phone, I could hear his fingers running over the keyboard, then silence. “There aren’t any listed.” Odd. It seemed to me that someone should have at least one saxophone for sale.

  “Are you sure about this?” I asked, while adding up our minutes and multiplying each by one dollar.

  “Not one.”

  Trying to save money, I closed the call without saying good-bye. Now I worried. For twenty dollars, I now owned a shiny saxophone that might not sell at all. What did I know about musical instruments anyway? The only thing I could play was the radio. On my way out of the house, an elderly man stopped me and asked if I would sell him the sax. He would pay me twenty dollars more than what I paid. I would not only get my twenty dollars back, but also make twenty dollars on it within minutes of my purchase. It sounded good to me, and I viewed it as God’s unexpected provision, a Christmas blessing.

  The man and I stepped outside to find a dry spot under the overhang of the house and struck our deal. He opened his worn wallet and shuffled through the one-dollar bills searching for larger bills. With shaking fingers, he pulled out one crisp twenty and then another and handed them to me. Then he pulled the sax in its case from my arms.

  I chuckled, leaping over rain puddles on the way back to my car, thinking about how pleased my husband would be with me that I had turned a profit so quickly. With temperatures quickly falling, there weren’t any other sales, so I returned home a bit richer than when I had left.

  “Look at you!” Rick said proudly as I handed him the cash.

  Then I sat at the computer, went to the eBay home page, and typed in the brand of saxophone I had owned for less than five minutes. To my horror, three exact matches came up—and they were all selling for over five hundred dollars with days left on the auctions. “Rick!” I yelled, pointing at the screen. “Look!”

  My dear husband wrinkled his nose and said, “Oh.”

  “You said there weren’t any saxophones listed!” I became weak. I was losing consciousness.

  “Hmmm, that’s weird. When I looked, there weren’t any listed.”

  Suddenly, I realized what he had done. Rick hadn’t gone to the eBay home page. He had gone to my seller’s page, and, of course, I didn’t have a sax listed. I had an enamel coffee pot with no bids, a sunbonnet girl quilt with no bids, and a primitive cabinet, also without a bid. I had sold the sax cheap. God wanted to bless me abundantly, and I had blown it! It was as if someone had snatched money right out of my pocket, and I had just let it happen.

  Frantic, my first instinct was to drive around town, try to find the man who bought the sax, and offer him sixty dollars to let me buy it back. He would get his forty dollars back and make twenty on it, just as I had done. It sounded reasonable to me, but with the wind now reaching forty miles an hour and sleet large enough to cause tree limbs to fall, I figured I better stay home. But I did put the saxophone auctions on my watch page and groaned loudly with every bid. At the end of one auction, with a final bid of nearly a thousand dollars, I shrieked, “That coulda been me!”

  With Christmas a few days away, I couldn’t shake the negative frame of mind I allowed myself to sink into. Running my fingers through my hair, I lamented over working so hard for every penny I earned. Couldn’t I just catch a break one time? I was at my job for at least ten hours a day, teaching and then tutoring both before and after school. On weekends, I was so worn out that I spent the whole time sleeping. Even with my husband’s overtime, our monthly budget was stretched to the max. The extra cash would have been such a luxury. My blessing had been stolen.

  But it was done, over. No turning back the day for a do-over. Yet, I just couldn’t let it go. Late at night, I sat by the lighted Christmas tree feeling quite angry with myself for harboring ill feelings. My brain kept replaying over and over that moment of selling the sax. My therapy was supposed to relieve tension, not create it. I felt envious and filled with greed. God was revealing a side of me that I had no idea was there, but this situation sure shined a spotlight on it.

  I opened the Bible to Galatians 6:9 (NIV): “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” Next I turned in my concordance to the verses on praising God and made note cards of ten verses. Each time I thought about the sax, I lifted my arms upward and praised God, thanking him, and quoting scripture. “Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thess. 5:18 NIV). It was amazing how the turmoil fled, leaving behind pure happiness. It set me totally free, and once more my life became enjoyable. I also let my husband off the hook, and his life became enjoyable once again, too.

  Our family had a blessed Christmas. We attended church together, had a big feast, and everyone found what they wished for under the tree. But my son’s gift to me took the prize for the holiday. Inside the box was forty dollars worth of one-dolla
r bills—the perfect denomination for garage sales. A few months later, this gift came in handy when garage sales were aplenty once again due to good weather.

  One morning, at one such sale, I spied my sax buyer hunched over a box, going through old sheet music! A twinge of regret hit me, so I pretended I didn’t see him. But he recognized me and called out, “Hello there! Have you found any treasures today?”

  “No,” I heaved out the word heavily, then sang inside my spirit, Praise him, praise him, Jesus our precious redeemer. . . .

  As I turned to walk away, he grabbed hold of my arm. “I want you to know that because of your spontaneous generosity, I found my old passion and took up the sax again. Being retired, I now volunteer my time to teach kids how to play it.” He wiggled his fingers over the throat of an invisible sax. It was then that I noticed his frailty, his worn clothes, and his old shoes.

  My perspective totally shifted. I thought he had taken my blessing, when in fact he was my blessing. God’s provision is for all of us. And I was blessed to have found it twice in the most unusual place. I call that a double blessing.

  Robin Lee Shope

  A Closed Highway Opened Hearts

  The everyday kindness of the back roads more than make up for the acts of greed in the headlines.

  Charles Kuralt

  Several years ago, our family of five began its annual Christmas trek to Grandma’s house. As we traveled from Wisconsin to Indiana on Christmas Eve day, the weather became increasingly worse. Heavy snow continued to fall, and high winds, which swept across the flat farmlands, whipped up the snow and dumped it into drifts across the highway, slowing traffic to a crawl. All movement came to a complete halt near an off-ramp when we encountered snowplows parked sideways across the road to block the highway. Their bundled-up operators, who stood beside the plows in the road, slogged to our car to inform us, “The highway’s closed. This is as far as you can go.”

  “But what can we do?” we asked.

  They replied, “There is a small church just down the road. They have opened its doors to stranded travelers.” Creeping carefully down the off-ramp, we caught sight of a white wooden building with a spire that became our inn for Christmas Eve night.