Christmas Memories

Many people have pleasant Christmas memories.

Jan Waters, who attends Faith Temple Church in Taylors, S.C., says, “One of my favorite memories about Christmas is when I was small I would sit by our fireplace. The fire warmed me to the bone. The heat coming from that fire is [like] the warmth I felt when Jesus came into my heart. My mom would peel me a navel orange, and I would sit by the fire and eat my orange. The orange was so juicy and sweet. I usually ate two of them. The smell of a fireplace was and still is so comforting to me. Now that I am on my own, I do not have the luxury of doing that any more. How times have changed.”

Christmastime may stir happy memories but can cause us to think of losses, too.

Brenda Locklear of Laurinburg, N.C., works in a carpet-dyeing plant. I recently asked Brenda, a Christian grandmother with Lumbee Indian ancestry, to tell me something about her childhood memories of Christmas.

“A shoebox,” she responded. Moisture filled her eyes, and she lifted a hand to wipe away a tear.

“A shoebox?” I asked, feeling nervous about possibly upsetting a longtime friend and coworker.

Brenda explained, “When we’d get our shoes to go to school each fall, Mama would say, ‘Keep your box.’”

Her late mother used those shoeboxes for her children’s Christmas gifts.

Brenda grew up in rural Hoke County, N.C. She had two older brothers and was born the third of six children (three boys, three girls). Her mother was unmarried.

“Did she wrap the boxes for you?” I asked.

“We couldn’t afford wrapping paper,” Brenda said. “In the box would be an apple, an orange, some nuts and candy – hard candy, Christmas candy, and there wouldn’t be much of that. That’s all she could afford.”

Brenda said she, being the oldest girl in her family, babysat younger siblings while her mother and brothers worked as sharecroppers, raising tobacco.

“I never knew my father – never knew what a father was,” Brenda said, noting that she and her baby brother share the same father. When she graduated from high school, a man she thought could be her father, told her he was.

She asked her mother if that man was telling the truth. Brenda recalls that her mother said, “Well, if he says it, you must be his.”

“She wouldn’t admit it,” Brenda said.

Brenda’s maternal grandmother, Nurseann Locklear, took her to church. (Nurseann’s husband died of a heart attack at age 29. She later became engaged to a soldier who died overseas before they could marry. Nurseann remained single until the end of her long life.)

“I always went to church,” Brenda says. “It was a little country church.”

She and her husband, Mike, accepted Christ early in their marriage, she says. They faithfully attend a Church of God of Prophecy and have two adult daughters, four grandsons and a granddaughter. I pray that Brenda enjoys a wonderful Christmas, this year, and that Christ continues healing hurts and disappointments she has experienced.

My early memories of Christmas include a drama presented at Gum Springs Pentecostal Holiness Church in Greenville County, S.C. I was old enough to read and was given a part in that “play” about a modern family at Christmastime. My 3-years-younger sister, Shirley, had a part, too. I recall the darkened church and the pulpit moved aside to make way for a couch. The troubled family featured in the play ended up having a Merry Christmas, with the Lord’s help.

In those days, Gum Springs Church usually gave a large grocery bag of fruit to each family attending the Sunday night service preceding Christmas. Nowadays, a bag of fruit might not mean much, but I recall one family who showed up at our church just to get a Christmas bag of fruit. (At least I, as a child, suspected that’s why that family came.) When fruit bags were presented at the end of the service, that family’s young mother left her two small children and her husband sitting on a pew near the back of the church. She walked forward and received a bag of fruit. I can still envision her thin face and long, wispy, straight brown hair. I never saw that family, again, but the presence of that mother and her family at that service caused me to think about people who lived outside our church. I wondered if they had the hope I had – a hope in Jesus Christ encouraged by folk in my church who took time to teach me about Christ, pray with me to receive Christ and patiently encourage me to participate in a Christmas play.

Father, please fill hearts with Christ’s love and healing during this Christmas season, in Jesus’ name. Amen.