Christmas week. As a young girl in the 30’s I had quite a different kind of Christmas decoration and anticipation of Santa coming. I have always loved to read, I suppose because my mother’s family were readers. My grandmother was a staunch supporter of education and two of my mother’s sisters became teachers. One taught for 38 years and one married and never taught at all.

I spent a lot of time at my grandmother’s house as a young girl and was deeply influenced by her and my aunts, still at home. I loved learning and was full of questions…….and often told to read such and such a book. I read all of my mother’s favorites when she was young. They were full of character and ‘good’ always predominated over ‘evil’. I was full of ideals about life.

When we lived in Omaha, NE. there was always a serial story which began the first of December and ran until Christmas Eve in the Omaha World Herald. I couldn’t wait to come in from school, warm up, have some of mama’s cookies or cake and read the story of the day. I would lay down on the living room floor with the paper stretched out before me and eagerly read the day’s adventure. After all of these years, since, I still think of that every year. Oftentimes it is the little, wonderfully insignificant things that we carry with us our whole life through.

It is hard to imagine that children today would be as intense and content with a story in a newspaper. We were taught in school to read the daily paper and one teacher always had us take five words that we didn’t know the meaning of….look them up in the dictionary and then write a sentence using each one. The next day in class we each took our turn, standing by our desk, reading the five words and our sentences…….we had memorization constantly. We not only read poems or passages from great works but we were to recite them as well.

I thank God for good teachers. I had wonderful teachers who taught because they had a “calling.” Their pride was in seeing how much they could stuff into our little brains before passing us on to the next grade. I can almost recall every teacher’s name that I ever had. I’m sure they are all gone now but their hard work lives on in those of us who profited from their influence.

This week I am going to recall simple pleasures of my past and I hope you will share some of yours. The memories that have stood the test of time are what Christmas is all about. The gift. The gifts we have been given to carry the rest of our lives……it all began in a manger.

Until tomorrow,
Essentially Esther