Tonight is Christmas Eve and as I watch the activities and the fun you are having, I can but reflect back to a Christmas Eve sixty some years ago. You are enjoying Christmas, so did we, so many years ago. We were just as starry eyed, just as excited but our Christmas celebration was very different.

Your Christmas tree is artificial and therefore beautifully shaped and odorless and decorated with shiny ornaments and electric lights. Our tree was a live cedar cut and brought home from a neighbor’s pasture. It was not perfect and had to be positioned just right so as to show its best side. It smelled like cedar - a wonderful woodsy smell. It was decorated with apples, oranges, decorated cookies and candy canes. It had garlands of popcorn strung by us with needles and twine. Festoons of colored paper and maybe a few purchased ornaments handed down from previous years. The tree was always tall enough to touch the ceiling. It was topped with a much used angel. Instead of electric lights it was lighted with candles. Someone always stood near the tree ready to snuff out the fire because the candles often set fire to the branches. The candles were only lighted once or twice during the Christmas season because of the fire hazard.

We had tried all day to catch Santa Claus in the act of bringing our gifts but we never had any success. We knew he was supposed to come down the chimney of the fireplace but we didn’t have a fireplace. Only a stove pipe and that was too small and besides, there was a fire in the stove. He simply couldn’t come in that way. Well, we finally decided he must have come in while we were at supper or busy elsewhere because when we were allowed to enter the parlor which had been closed all day our gifts were under the tree. Not wrapped in colored paper and bows as yours are but placed under the tree for all of us to see and wonder which was ours before someone distributed the gifts we all stood around the tree and listened to “Silent Night” and “Old Tannenbaum”; played on an old “78” phonograph record. We also sang several carols. And then “Oh, the excitement” we got our gifts; Maybe a ball, a pencil box, some tin doll dishes or something very simple. To you, they may seem very meager. To us, they were wonderful because they were the only gifts we ever received. On birthdays we got a playful spanking, one lick for every year of our age and one to grow on and maybe the first piece of a birthday cake which we all shared.

After the gifts were given out we all gathered around the stove in the dining room and for the only day in the year we were allowed to eat all the oranges, apples and Christmas goodies we could possibly hold. The entire house smelled wonderful with the aroma of the fruit, cedar and burning wood. The day ended will all of the family not yet asleep going to midnight mass at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Moulton. It was a time of fellowship, of family togetherness and of love shared with parents, brothers and sisters and surely a day to be remembered always as we hope this day will be for you.