Another Christmas in the books. It was a good one, complete with snow storm. I hope everyone had an abundance of food, family, gifts, and more. Usually, we have just enough of everything to be thankful it’s over. It’s fun to add another chapter to the memories. I did have a bit of a reality check, though, as I watched the little ones play Christmas day.

My great-nephews were driving toy cars around their great grandma’s Christmas village. One particular car hot rodding through the Department 56 streets caught my attention and took me back to a past Christmas. I’m going to be honest and transparent here. My realization was a little disturbing.

When I was a wee lad, after the Christmas morning unwrapping carnage ended, the family would troop over to Lee and Carolyn’s for Christmas breakfast. I remember one particular trek as if it were yesterday. It was an unusually beautiful Christmas morning and mom and dad let me walk across the cornfield to Fear’s. The Fear’s would always give me a gift, and that year it happened to be two little Krazee Wheel cars. One of them was the hotrod pickup my nephews were playing with this Christmas.

That doesn’t seem that extraordinary, I know. But, hear me out. Somehow, some way, and much more suddenly than I was prepared to accept, that little Krazee Wheel car is fifty years old! The little cast iron car that I played with at my grandma and grandpa’s was barely fifty years old when I played with it as a boy.

I contemplated all of this deeply today as I watched the burn barrel. We had a nice heavy snow for Christmas, so it was a good time to light up the fire and get rid of a few months of wood and branches and things. I stared into the dancing fire and thought about my uncles playing with the little cast iron sedan. Their memories of it would have been the same as mine with the little toy pickup. To them, it was just yesterday. Their Christmas’s in the 30’s were as clear and colorful as mine in the 70’s and now my great-nephews present day.

I thought about all those faces that aren’t here to celebrate Christmas with us anymore. I could see them in the flames as I stared into the fire. I could hear their voices and laughter, smell the pipe smoke at grandpa and grandma’s and feel the oil stove burning my backside at Grandma Eva’s. I started wondering if I had a favorite Christmas.

Maybe when I was five, or eight, or twelve, or my junior year when I got five basketballs. My favorite could have been my first one with my lovely bride, or being a young dad myself with five little ones tearing presents open at light speed. It could have even been this one, but my beautiful bride would tell you that each Christmas, I’m a child.

It’s a comfortable place for me, somewhere between six and twelve. It’s so easy to look into the flames and relive those Christmas’s in vivid Technicolor and be a twelve year old boy again. I was so much a twelve year old boy again, that my twelve year old self reminded me that I had thrown away a can of spray paint the other day.

The almost adult version of me would like to make a recommendation to all of you fine folks who may read this. I’m not sure if there is an OSHA standard for this or not, but I would suggest being at least twenty………..twenty five, yes, definitely a minimum of twenty five feet away from the burn barrel should a much younger version of yourself decide to throw an empty can of black satin spray paint into it. I’ve made better decisions. I’ve made worse. But this one was…………………..GLORIOUS!

Happy New Year Friends