The Wonder of Christmas
Nostalgic Christmas Remembrances and
My Christmas Carols Awakening
With a grateful heart, I count the many Christmases I have been blessed to celebrate. This most special holiday always brings a flood of memories about the magical Christmases Mother gave me and my two sisters. Should my memory someday fail to remember all the details, it’s comforting to know I’ve documented so much of my life and that of my family in my memoir, Marcella’s Secret Dreams and Stories: A Mother’s Legacy. (Maybe you should put your memories in writing before it’s too late to remember the minute details.)
Daddy was a happy participant in all the holiday activities, but Mother did all the work and planning. She shopped for the tree we loved to decorate each year. We were financially poor, so Mother made some of our presents and bought other inexpensive gifts so we’d have several packages to unwrap. Even the family dog and cat had packages to play with. I still have some of my childhood gifts, the most treasured of which is now a vintage Hollywood Doll with a complete wardrobe Mother and I made together in the evenings. As we sewed the tiny garments by hand, we listened to radio programs like Lux Radio Theater, The Whistler, and The Shadow. (I later gave my doll a home in a handwoven basket with a hidden music box.)
Mother was a great cook, and holiday fare always included homemade bread, cake, and pies, especially pumpkin. Since her recipe for pumpkin pie used Milnot, I’m sure she found it on the can. To this day, I still use her recipe, and sister Mollie would too, if only she could find a can of Milnot in California. She says no other brand of evaporated milk gives the same remembered taste.
My Christmas Carols Awakening
Our parents taught me and my sisters to revere God and to read and believe the Bible. But they did not have a relationship with Jesus until they neared the end of their lives. It’s one thing to believe in Jesus; another to walk with Him, and it takes some of us longer than others to make this transition. My Christian friends find it hard to believe I was 57 years old before life finally wore me down to the nubbins and I cried out to God for help.
After hearing a radio sermon by Greg Laurie, I fell to my knees in the wee hours of the morning and ardently prayed the sinner’s prayer. My life changed overnight, and my response was to immediately begin to journal my walk with Jesus and tell everyone I knew about the miracle I’d had. Shortly afterward, I wrote the first version of my Testimony for Christ, which I revised and published on this website when it opened.
Throughout my life, I sang Christmas carols, but until I was born anew, I didn’t comprehend their meaning. For example, O Little Town of Bethlehem includes a plea to Christ to “be born in us today.” Hark, the Herald Angels Sing includes the line, “born to give them second birth.” Until my miracle happened, I didn’t have “ears to hear” the Gospel message in the church hymns or carols. I still remember that Sunday in church when the congregation was singing Amazing Grace and I finally understood the meaning of these words:
“Amazing grace, how sweet it is, that saved a wretch like me,
I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.”
Overwhelmed by those words, I choked up and was unable to sing as tears of thankfulness flowed. Suddenly I knew that through God’s grace and mercy I had been forgiven and had received the gift of salvation and the promise of heaven. Later, I was astonished to learn that nothing I could have done on my own would have been enough to gain me entry to heaven:
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9; NIV).
Christmas is much more than a Christian holiday and a time to decorate our home with boughs of holly, to give gifts to our loved ones, and to “eat, drink, and be merry.” It’s about celebrating the birth and incarnation of Jesus, the time when the Son of God became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14):
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:16-17; NIV).
May you focus on the One who is the light of the world and the reason for the season. As Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12; NIV).
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I pray you can see the wonder of God in your life and the world at large, and that in this Christmas season, you have family or friends who give you joy and a sense of peace. In addition to a wonderful family and many Christian friends, God also put two cats in this widow’s life—the first one in 2005 (Charlee), and Liza in 2019 after Charlee died. Completely different in personality, they had two things in common: Neither was a “lap cat” and both of them loved Christmas trees but didn’t bother the tinsel or ornaments, as the pictures below illustrate
Charlee, pictured at top, is gone now, but she loved napping under my Christmas tree and carefully stepped over the train for her daily naps. She was a sweet companion who wanted to be petted on her terms. Liza, now six and a constant companion who invites petting all day long, loves the three small Christmas trees I set up each year. Rescued after living in the wild for some time, it took only a couple of times of me telling Liza “No, you can’t play with the ornaments,” for her to say (in catspeak), “Okay, but I like the tree. Can I just nap here?”
Stories about these two rescued cats are documented in the following articles:
♥ LIZA: A Rescue Cat for Christmas
♥ How I was Conned into Adoption by a Fluffy-tailed Tabby
First published as a Musings post in December 2023;
updated with photos and archived in December 2024.
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