Tag: christmas

Angels always close to us

“There is an angel close to you this day. Merry Christmas, and I wish you well.”
—Paul Crume (1912 –1975) Dallas Morning News columnist who wrote a front-page column every day for 24 years.

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As I sit crafting one more Christmas column, I do it relishing in the blessing of memories and personal traditions. Which means one more time, I’ll read my favorite Christmas columns from the work of long-time Dallas Morning News editor Paul Crume.

One, entitled “Christmas Fires,” I will still read this year, despite un-Christmas like 70-degree weather. The other, “To Touch an Angel,” was first published on Christmas Day of 1967 and is still published every Christmas in the Morning News as “Angels Among Us.”

I believe Angels are among us all the time. During this time of the year, reminders of them are seen everywhere on Christmas trees. The tree top angel at my house put in for vacation this year, so there’s a gnome filling in. But I know angels are still around.

Christmas has always been a magical season for me. Special times steeped in the comfort of family and loved ones gathering. Sharing a meal. Laughing. Being thankful to our Creator.  

Times like the Christmas living on the lake when Santa brought us all bicycles. My kids and I enjoyed Christmas morning peddling cheer along county roads around Lake Murvaul.

Then there’s the time we spent a snowy family Christmas in the mountains of Taos, New Mexico. Skiing days and enjoying a tiny tree with gifts, celebrating in our room at the lodge. Magically, Santa still found us.

And how many times have I smiled, recalling the Christmas when my incredibly artistic daughter, Robin, gathered up empty boxes and crumpled paper after gifts were opened, taking it all to her room. It was a while before I discovered she had left new toys under the Christmas tree while replicating Elvis’s Graceland home from the scavenged materials.

It was another 1980s Christmas Eve in Center when I used on my own children, an admonition that my grandmother once used on me. “You better go to sleep before Santa comes.”

Assuming my children were deep in dreams of the Jolly Old Elf, I tackled boxes bearing “Some Assembly Required.” Thinking, “This won’t take long.”

Pushing midnight, the Little Homemaker play kitchen was done, inserting the last tab A into slot 4 and securing with one #6 bolt and one #9 nut. Then came the tricycle, the doll stroller, and stocking stuffers. Just in time to experience the magic of an early Christmas morning sunrise.

Watching my children experience Christmas morning always reminded me of Christmas dawning in Mount Pleasant one 1960s Yule season when I heard a soft voice at my bedroom door. “You think he’s come?”

As the elder sibling realizing that Santa was more than mere magic, my trust became helping preserve the mystery for my younger sisters.

“I don’t know,” I told my youngest sister, Sylvia. “Let’s go see.” With middle sister Leslie also up and curious, we peeked into the living room. Changing colors projected Christmas magic onto the shiny aluminum tree. Under it, a collection of unwrapped gifts glittered in the early morning light.

“I think he’s been here,” I said.

And, about that Christmas Eve warning I borrowed from my grandmother. As a child, Christmas was a time of anticipation. The excruciating wait for Christmas to finally get here. Then waking up Christmas morning, excited to see what St. Nick had left.

We moved a lot back then. Perry Brothers five-and-dime store managers were relocated more often than Methodist ministers. Four times by the time I was in fifth grade. Traveling to East Texas for Christmas made updating forwarding addresses for Santa a full-time job.

There was magic in my grandmother’s bedtime stories on Christmas Eve with her frequent reminders that, “You better go to sleep before ‘ol Santy comes.”

If her stories didn’t put me to sleep fast enough, she typically turned off the bedside lamp, pretending to hear reindeer on the roof.  And I pretended to be asleep, still wishing it were Christmas morning.

My wish for each of you is the same as every year. That you are blessed with the wonderful magic of Christmas, both making memories and reminiscing about them.

In the company of angels close to us.

—Leon Aldridge

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Aldridge columns are featured in these publications: The Center Light and Champion, The Mount Pleasant Tribune, the Rosenberg Fort Bend Herald, the Taylor Press, the Alpine Avalanche,  the Fort Stockton Pioneer, the Elgin Courier, The Monitor in Naples, and Motor Sports Magazine.

© Leon Aldridge and A Story Worth Telling 2025. Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Leon Aldridge and ‘A Story Worth Telling’ with appropriate and specific directions to the original content.

Christmas traditions, some old, some new

“O Christmas Tree, O Christmas tree,
Of all the trees most lovely.
Each year you bring to us delight.
With brightly shining Christmas light!”
— O Tannenbaum (Christmas tree) old German Christmas song from 1824 originally sung by Melchior Franck.

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Lights are brightly shining. Christmas decorating has started at my house. Emphasis on “started” because for me, decorating is a work in progress. It doesn’t happen overnight. Or even a week. Sometimes, it lasts until Christmas Eve.

Remembering.

That according to Mom, Christmas trees are put in place and decorated the Friday after Thanksgiving, not one day sooner. There was never a Christmas tree in her house on or before Thanksgiving. Ever.

My mother was a traditionalist in many ways. She also practiced “never wear white after Labor Day.” You could set your calendar by it when I was growing up. If the ladies at church were still wearing white, summer was not over. But when Mom put away her white hat, gloves, and shoes, we knew fall was just around the corner.

That “wearing white” thing fell out of tradition before the turn of the last century. But bless her heart, Mom was a diehard. She gave up wearing hats to church only after she and one other lady were the last of the faithful. Even then, she complained that she wasn’t properly dressed for church services.

“Never thought I’d live to see the day,” I remember her saying, “when a lady would go to church without a hat and gloves.”

“What is this country coming to?” is what Mom said after seeing for the first time, a brightly lit Christmas tree adorning the picture window a couple of houses down the street … a whole week before Thanksgiving.  

Historically, Americans found Christmas trees an oddity at any time before German settlers brought the tradition to America in the mid 1800s. Back then, plants and trees that remained naturally green year-round held special meaning in winter. Evergreen boughs over doors and windows were hung to celebrate the winter solstice while looking forward to cold weather giving way to spring’s return.

I appreciated cold weather at Christmas when I missed it while living in Boerne in the Texas Hill Country a few years ago. Where cold weather, as most recognize it, is rare. Short sleeves in December were the norm. I even recall wearing shorts on more than one Christmas day.

It was also a Hill Country Christmas the time the kids and I enjoyed seasonal decorations so much that we left the tree up a few days into the new year. Until Valentine’s Day. We boxed up the Christmas decorations and replaced them with hearts and Cupids. And we loved it! So much so that we rolled right into Easter with it, decorating appropriately, of course. Memorial Day. Followed by Independence Day. And so on.

But that violated one of Mom’s other traditions. “Got to get the tree down after Christmas day.” When the last dish from Christmas dinner was washed and dried, she was on it. “The New Year is coming. Bring me the boxes for those lights and ornaments.”

The first glass ornaments were seen in America in the late 1800s. Electric holiday lights were not common in U.S. homes until rural electrification became widespread in the late 1950s. That was about the same time Christmas decorating began to change.

Mom rocked it in the early 1960s when she bought an aluminum Christmas tree. Her first artificial tree. After first scoffing at artificial trees. We spent nights watching the color wheel change hues on the metallic “leaves” instead of our still somewhat new very first television set. After all, the TV was just black-and-white.

But even with the new tree, Mom never wavered on her traditions. It still went up on Friday after Thanksgiving and was gone soon after Christmas day.

Whether keeping traditions or making my own, I still decorate. Helpers are dwindling. Kids are grown and gone, living off in other cities busy with activities and traditions of their own.

But I still do it. With music and memories.

“Rockin’ around the Christmas tree
Have a happy holiday
Everyone dancin’ merrily
In the new old-fashioned way.”
— 1958, recorded by Brenda Lee.

Thanksgiving is behind us. Let the season begin. The Christmas tree is up with respect to my mother’s traditions. And recalling many gatherings of Christmases past with family and friends,

I hope Mom will forgive me, however. Once again, I may leave my decorations up for a while after Christmas.

Just for the memories.

—Leon Aldridge

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Aldridge columns are featured in these publications: The Center Light and Champion, The Mount Pleasant Tribune, the Rosenberg Fort Bend Herald, the Taylor Press, the Alpine Avalanche,  the Fort Stockton Pioneer, the Elgin Courier, The Monitor in Naples, and Motor Sports Magazine.

© Leon Aldridge and A Story Worth Telling 2025. Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Leon Aldridge with appropriate and specific directions to the original content.

Wherever you are, Merry Christmas

“Just remember, the true spirit of Christmas lies in your heart.”
— Santa Claus, “The Polar Express” 2004 movie

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A five-year-old was feeling Christmas magic at his grandparent’s house in Northeast Texas some years ago.

Home for his family back then was somewhere in West Texas. Maybe it was Ballinger, or Muleshoe. Might have been Pampa. One of those places where he made childhood memories before his father decided the family would stop moving after settling in Mount Pleasant.

Visions of St. Nick swirled in his mind as he snuggled close to his grandmother while she read a bedtime story that early 1950s Christmas Eve. “You better go to sleep before ‘ol Santy comes,” she said. “If he sees you’re awake, he’ll just keep on going.”

Suddenly, he heard something. Was that the “ding-ding” of a bicycle bell coming from the vicinity of the living room? “Oh no,” he thought, “Santa can’t see me awake.”

“He’s here,” Granny said. In a flash, she turned off the bedside lamp. The child clinched his eyes tightly shut hoping that if Santa did peep into the bedroom, he would surely appear to be fast asleep.

A few years later in Mount Pleasant, the youngster had learned the secret of how Santa managed to know where to deliver Christmas gifts. And always to the right house. But as the oldest sibling, his duty was to help preserve the legend of Santa for his younger sisters.

Christmas 1945 “V-Mail” telegram my father sent to my mother in Pittsburg, Texas while he was spending Christmas in Europe with the U.S. Army 276th Combat Engineers.

The night sky was fading to gray with the Christmas dawn, No one was stirring when he was awakened by a small voice at his bedroom door. “You think Santa has come yet,” his baby sister whispered?

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s go sneak a peek and see.”

All three siblings looked as he quietly opened the living room door just enough for a glimpse of Christmas splendor. His sisters oohed and awed at colors sparkling like shiny magic on the aluminum tree around which were neatly placed gifts from Santa.

He smiled. It was Christmas magic in the early morning dawn.

“I think he has been here,” he whispered to his sisters. “We better get back in bed until Mom and Dad wake up.”

Another twenty years later on a Christmas Eve in Center, he sat in front of the fireplace waiting to make sure both of his children were sound asleep. He had tucked them in bed earlier, using the same line on them that his grandmother had used on him when he was their age.

“You better go to sleep so Santa will come.”

Hoping they had asked for their last drink of water and quizzed him for the last time about mailing their letters to the North Pole, he pulled Santa’s gifts from their hiding place in the closet. Hot chocolate in one hand and tools in the other, he was ready for “Some Assembly Required” duty.

“Just 9:00 o’clock,” he noted with a smile. “This won’t take long.”

About midnight, the Little Suzy Homemaker play kitchen lacked only one “insert tab A into slot 4 and secure with one #6 bolt and one #9 nut.”

“That wasn’t bad, “ he thought. “Only had to take it apart and start over twice.”

All that remained was a tricycle, a doll stroller, and half a dozen small items to wrap. “Just enough time to make a pot of coffee,” he thought. Before experiencing the magic of another early Christmas morning in a child’s eye.

In the decades of Christmas Eves following that all-nighter, he saw a variety of Christmas magic. Like the snowy Yule spent with his family in the mountains of Taos, New Mexico. And the Christmas morning he and his teenage kids rode new bicycles around county roads on Lake Murvaul.

This Christmas, even as he commits words to digital bits and bytes, he’s not sure where he’ll be Christmas Day. So many friends and family from his Christmas past are gone now. And his children live away with families of their own. But one thing’s for sure. Wherever he is and whatever he is doing, the seasonal magic from decades of Christmas joy will fill his heart every Christmas present.

So, I wish … I mean, he wishes for you as well, that the magical blessings of Christmas fill your heart. Not just at Christmas, but throughout the year.

Wherever you are. Merry Christmas.

—Leon Aldridge

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Aldridge columns are featured in these publications: The Mount Pleasant Tribune, the Rosenberg Fort Bend Herald, the Taylor Press, the Alpine Avalanche,  the Fort Stockton Pioneer, the Elgin Courier, The Monitor in Naples, and Motor Sports Magazine.

© Leon Aldridge and A Story Worth Telling 2024. Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Leon Aldridge and ‘A Story Worth Telling’ with appropriate and specific directions to the original content.