The challenge to make someone’s Christmas….
December 23, 2008 1 Comment
My father, E. W. G. Smith, loved Christmas. We could get him into a Father Christmas suit anytime of the year. He and Jimmy Ross, the jazz pianist and our neighbor, would use the same old and tattered suit and visit each others children with old pillowcases thrown over their backs – even in August.
Come Christmas Eve and dad would sing about the “little boy that Santa Clause forgot.” Real tears would stream down his face. I knew he was crying for his own lost boyhood. I knew he was the boy that Santa Clause forgot, and I knew he was the boy who went home to “last year’s broken toys.”
He did something about his own deprivation by providing for others: I vividly recall my father packing large boxes of groceries from the shelves of his general dealer shop in Blackburn Road and placing them anonymously on the doorstep of a family he knew to have hit hard times.
And now, all these years later, I challenge you to seize the day. Go ahead, get out there, and make someone’s Christmas through exercising your own deep desire for generosity – I know it is in there, it comes with the human package.
