Wood Lake--the last battle

There’s a sign, but not much more, and there's a tree down the path adorned with a couple of colorful prayer streamers from someone sworn to remember. You can’t miss it. Just take the path at the crest of the hill—very much worth a hike if the weather smiles because the twisting creek down below is so charming it’s hard to imagine that once upon the time a fight down there meant men dying. The monument across the road bears the names of the fallen—the white men anyway—if you’re looking for specifics.

The minimalism at the site of the Battle of Wood Lake is apropos. A couple dozen died here, but the engagement itself wasn't much more than a skirmish, just a couple hours of fighting--and the whole event wasn't anywhere near Wood Lake. It was fought at the edge of Lone Tree Lake, a pond that up and left long ago.

Still, what happened here, just a few miles from the Minnesota River, was the last battle of the bloody Dakota War of 1862. What happened here ended the uprising but not the conflict. Battles rarely do.

The government's mission with respect to the Sioux warriors was simple: get rid of the lot of them. Chase them out of state, or kill them all. Exterminate 'em, do a little mid-19th century ethnic cleansing.

By September of 1862, a month after first blood was shed, Gen. Henry Hastings Sibley, commander of the government forces, was roundly criticized for his sluggish pursuit of the Dakota killers. When his troops had grown to almost 1700 strong, when he had enough ammunition and fresh mounts, he was ready.

It was a ragged affair that offers no textbook strategies. Sibley camped below the path you take when you follow that trail east. That was a blunder he might have paid dearly for because the Dakota were not all that far away, just a bit north and east. He never knew, never checked.

His men were a motley bunch. On the morning of September 20, a pack of 'em simply decided-- on their own--to grab some potatoes from the garden at the agency. They left camp, totally on the sly, and when they returned their creaky wagon nearly ran over Dakota warriors lying in the grass poised and ready for an attack. It’s hard to say, 150 years later, who was most surprised. Thank God for small potatoes.

The Battle of Wood Lake was a mess, first lead to last. When that potato wagon tromped through the warriors, it ignited a fiasco that ended two hours later when the Dakota simply backed off and left. Fourteen Indian bodies were left in the grass. Some of them were scalped.

The Battle of Wood Lake wasn't really a skirmish, but it was the final engagement of the Dakota War of 1862.

We stopped by on a weekend when the road to the site was almost blocked by SUVs and vans who’d come out to a pumpkin patch. We sat up above the cutbank and tried to imagine what the battle might have looked like, but it took some diligence to imagine it. An old Farmall was hauling a hay rack full of moms and dads and kids back from a pumpkins to the barn, where they’d gobble up some treats, maybe drink some fresh brewed apple cider, spend some holiday bucks.

Across the highway there’s a stone obelisk behind a broad steel banner. “Sioux Indian War 1862," it says.

You can’t help thinking maybe the whole works ought to come down and get hauled off. Turn the place into a pumpkin patch park, hayrides for kids, pumpkin pie and muffins, ice cream--you know.

If what’s there of the battle stays, I'm thinking somebody is going to have to answer some kid who’ll look up at that sign or the monument behind it, and ask about what the heck happened at Wood Lake--and where is Wood Lake anyway?

Count on it. Someday, someone is going to have to know the answer. Maybe they'll have to ask whoever it is that hangs prayer streamers in the tree up the path on the other side of the creek. Ask him. Or her. They'll know. For sure, they'll know.

 

RIP--John Madden

I’m not afraid of flying; I just fear I’m going to die. I think I’m – vulnerable. I admit it. I don’t fly. I got claustrophobia. I don’t go in high buildings. I don’t do those things. I’m just myself, whatever that is. 

Whatever that is, that's John Madden.

Built like a frickin' buffalo, John Madden never spent an hour of his life being handsome. Cameras didn't necessarily like him, but neither could they look away.

He played ball, got drafted in fact, but when a knee went bad, his playing days were over. His talents lay elsewhere. He knew how, in some mystical way, to get the best out of everyone around him, which may well be the primary definition of what a coach is or should be. The John Madden star shown brightly in large part because he pitched the luminosity of those around him and, perhaps more importantly, the great world around him.

John Madden championed football, but, more than that, he championed life. Obituaries generally do their best to polish up their subjects, but yesterday's cavalcade of praise was not makeup. People loved John Madden, even people who didn't really give NFL football all that much attention. Everyone knew John Madden. Everyone loved him.

Some people have a way of sucking the oxygen out of any room they're in. Madden wasn't one of those. Madden opened the windows and let oxygen in, made it easier and sweeter to breathe. The man loved life.

One story, yesterday, really stuck. Because he didn't fly, wouldn't--he flat refused--the man spent endless hours in a motor home he suitably furnished. Here's the story. Once, out on the plains of Nebraska, Madden spotted a flower crowding the prairie roadsides. He pulled over, took out a beat-up book of wildflowers, stepped outside, stood there, book open, those flowers at his feet, and figured out exactly what they were.

That's a great story about a great coach, a great football commentator, and a great man. Madden took the time to love sunflowers.

It would be a chore to think of another human being whose death could usher in so much joy and praise.

“If you think about it," he once said, "I’ve never held a job in my life. I went from being an NFL player to a coach to a broadcaster. I haven’t worked a day in my life.”

Want to understand the love people had for the man? Deconstruct that line--"I haven't worked a day in my life." Somewhere along the line, the man learned to love. What a legacy.

Jesus and Don Jr.

Donald Trump Jr. is both intensely unappealing and uninteresting. He combines in his person corruption, ineptitude, and banality. He is perpetually aggrieved; obsessed with trolling the left; a crude, one-dimensional figure who has done a remarkably good job of keeping from public view any redeeming qualities he might have.

Thus begins Peter Wehner's article, "The Gospel of Donald Trump," in the Atlantic, a typical lib attack, I suppose, the kind of criticism you can't help but expect from those commie elites on the left.

Trump, Jr. needs his father, but he also has his own schtick. He runs around the country with a fully developed sense of grievance because he (like his classy father) has never been given the awed reverence they deserve getting for what they've done--you know, casinos, towers, golf courses. Poor kid--he's been so rejected by liberals that he says that now he'll have no more of it. Nobody knows the trouble he's seen, even though, as Wehner says, that sickening grievance stuff originates in a man who is himself, "an elitist, extravagantly rich son of a former president." Poor guy.

In a speaking gig last week, a few days before Christmas, Donald, Jr., told an cheering audience that RINO Republicans took on a New Testament ethic of turning the other cheek and thereby became nothing but a bunch of losers. He said it was time for the political forces he not only represents but leads to reject the pathetic silliness of a Christian ethic and just start swinging. "We’ve been playing T-ball for half a century while they’re playing hardball and cheating. Right? We’ve turned the other cheek," he said, "and I understand, sort of, the biblical reference—I understand the mentality—but it’s gotten us nothing. Okay? It’s gotten us nothing while we’ve ceded ground in every major institution in our country.”

It's time to drop the Jesus-thing like a bad habit. Give it up, Trumpsters, he says. Come out swinging. Come out punching. It's time to bloody those damned communists on the left.

No single voting block has been more faithful in its allegiance to the man and the myth of Donald E. Trump than American evangelicals, a majority of whom still believe a vast conspiracy wrested the Presidency out of their man's little hands. Most of them refuse vaccinations out of some misguided loyalty to something about the man which the man himself is now rejecting.

"He believes, as his father does," Wehner says of Don Jr., "that politics should be practiced ruthlessly, mercilessly, and vengefully. The ends justify the means. Norms and guardrails need to be smashed. Morality and lawfulness must always be subordinated to the pursuit of power and self-interest. That is the Trumpian ethic."

And hundreds of thousands, no millions who call themselves Christians march along behind him in a vast religious processional.

Amazing.

________________________ 

You can read Wehner's Atlantic article here.

Dignity (ii)

What Arnade does in Dignity, that neither Vance nor Osnos do, is venture out into the world of faith and religion, although Arnade, like Vance, ambles along much closer to a genre that is personal memoir than does Osnos. What we get in Dignity is an appraisal of faith I found almost shocking blessedly. I shouldn't have, but I did. It's difficult, I think, to find other similar books that venture into an analysis of the effects of the Christian faith in people's lives, but Arnade casts no doubt about his mission: he wants badly to find dignity in the lives of absolutely everyone he meets. One place he finds it is in church.

And here's why he's looking. "We need everyone--those in the back row, those in the front row--to listen to one another," he says, "and try to understand one another and understand what they value and try to be less judgmental." That's what he's about. That's what he's up to.

"Front row/back row" is a prevalent metaphor throughout. What he's describing thereby is a kind of church--front row folks, as you can imagine, are those who've been handed the keys to the kingdom, who know the rules, who've determined their lives will be greatly improved by education, who rule with authority and even occasionally with justice. I am in the front row.

The back row, on the other hand, includes those who barely make it into church at all, men and women who do not play starring rules in our lives--except perhaps in the headline-grabbing crimes they commit. They try--and most often fail--to get clean. They turn tricks. They wear black fishnet and ply themselves on street corners. The imbibe drugs, have for years, and occasionally turn to sales if and when they need money. If your seat is in the front row, you've got to turn all the way around and look away from what's happening up front in order to even realize that the back row is occupied.

Arnade dutifully measures his own church background: he was raised Catholic by parents who were happy to have him in church occasionally but didn't bother much with the faith themselves. When he went off to college, he says he took up faith in science and therefore simply walked away from whatever commitment he may have had a boy. He became, he says, not surprisingly, an atheist.

The four years it took him to corral the interviews he thought he needed for this book didn't change his faith commitment. He isn't off to seminary. He says that today he is more of an agnostic than an atheist because what he's come to see is the immense strength the church affords, not the Roman Catholic church per se or some suburban mega-church, but the run-down, miserable Pentecostal churches whose members are as embarrassing as the worship shenanigans they flop through every last Sunday they attend.

What he comes to learn, he says, is that the Christian faith sustains the people he's met, that it's the place where their otherwise sordid existences somehow find strength and even power to go on. The church, their faith in God and the risen Christ, is a significant source of their dignity.

The tragedy of  the streets means few can delude themselves into thinking they have it under control. You cannot ignore death there, and you cannot ignore human fallibility. It is easier to see that everyone is a sinner, everyone is fallible, and everyone is moral. It is easier to see that there are things just too deep, too important, or too great for us to know. It is far easier to recognize that one must come to peace with the idea that "we don't and never will have this under control." It is far easier to see religion not just a useful but as true.   

Dignity is not about Donald Trump, although the pathways it creates into our times and culture inevitably lead us into the neighborhood of the ex-President whose character dominates our lives and times. Dignity is  all about its title, about human dignity, specifically how some of us, the ones in the back row, seek to find it, and how some of us do by way of the Christian faith.

The unavoidable question I had when following the seamy lives Arnade explores is, "is my religious sensibility big enough, wide enough to admit Arnade's people, to love men and women who seem to make themselves unlovable?" 

My goodness, I was raised on the Beatitudes. I cut my teeth on the love of God. I wrote a book about grace. The most radical direction Arnade takes is old-line biblical cliche--"to love God above all and my neighbor as myself. On these two commandments. . ." well, you know.

Dignity isn't primarily about our church, our congregation, our confession or immediate faith family; it's about us, about me, about how I judge others, or condemn them, about who I consider to be children of God and who I consider to be beyond the reach even of the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

I received Dignity as a Christmas gift this season from my son, a very precious gift.

Book Report--Dignity by Chris Arnade

It's not particularly difficult to look up at Dignity, South Dakota's most recent gigantic sculpture (a la Rushmore and Crazy Horse), and register more than a little downright snobby skepticism. Historically at least, white folks in the region haven't shown all that much respect to Native American women. If crime figures tell any kind of story, they still don't. Still, there the Indian princess stands, fifty feet high, far above Lake Oahe--what was once the Missouri River but is now one in a series of reservoirs that drowned aspects of Native history and culture forever under water.

There she stands in her diamond-studded raiment, regally, like the royalty Indian women never really were. She's beautiful as she stands up there receiving her star quilt. Night or day, she's impressive--she really is. Still, it's difficult to be totally enthralled. Dignity can perhaps too easily be seen as yet another iteration of the white man's desire to romanticize Native life. She's another "noble savage."

I couldn't help thinking of Dignity when I read Chris Arnade's Dignity, because Arnade does everything he can to feature fellow human beings (of all races, by the way) who seemingly least deserve the description, who least express what most of us believe to be dignity.  For two years Arnade hangs around in some of the seediest pockets of the nation--and, for a white man like him especially--some of its most dangerous. 

Arnade's Dignity is one of a shelf full of books that attempt to understand the cultic following of ex-President Donald Trump. J. D. Vance gave Arnade's book a blurb, which makes sense. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy was maybe the first journalistic study to attempt to feature Trump's disciples in an attempt to understand how and why they could become so driven by a man as filthy rich and morally despicable as Trump was and still is.

Arnade is not only a journalist but a photographer, which means his Dignity is an album of photographs of the men and women he's interviewed, as well as the worlds from which they come. Aiming a camera at men and women that people his book--people with real issues, often at the bottom of the economic and social registers--is precarious work because the photographs can so easily feel like exploitation. Maybe that's just me--I don't know; but the gallery of shots included in Dignity only marginally benefit his really comprehensive and convincing survey. I listened to much of the book, and when I did, I honestly didn't miss the pictures. 

Evan Osnos's Wildland: the Making of America's Fury, the National Book Award winner, inhabits a similar genre, but is far more comprehensive, by design, than either Elegy or Dignity. Osnos creates an encyclopedia of the last five years--right up to and including January 6, 2020. If you're going to read one such book this year, I'd recommend Wildland.

But Arnade's Dignity does something no one else does: it features faith, the Christian faith, in ways neither Vance nor Osnos do. Faith is no small thing in the story of Donald Trump, of course. Yet today, he'd be nowhere without his vast evangelical following. What no one could ever have guessed--and what no one still quite fully understands--is how so many passionate evangelical Christian voters gave their hearts and souls away to a man who today wanders Lear-like through life with a moral compass that says only "out of order."

But they did follow him and they still do follow him, and it's almost impossible now to doubt that they will continue to follow him as slavishly as ever.

What I found most fascinating and blessed, really, in Arnade's Dignity is the very close attention he plays to faith in the lives of his subjects, not as an attribute of Trump's cultic following but for purposes of describing the vital and even redemptive role faith plays in the lives of people so immensely easy to despise--sex workers, drug addicts, and criminals, people literally and figuratively "on the street."

That feature I'd like to explore tomorrow.

(to be continued)

Sunday Morning Meds--Wounds

“He heals the brokenhearted 

and binds up their wounds.” Psalm 147:3

Our newspaper cunningly stopped placing free obituaries a few years ago; today, obits are paid columns; almost daily, those notices spread over two whole pages of the front news section. Even though no one has ever escaped it, death is still news.

Some deaths more so than others. Soon, my wife’s mother will pass away. For her, it couldn’t be soon enough. She has no mobility, very little sight, feels constant dizziness. When she goes, we’ll ache; but there will be precious few at her funeral, and other than the effect on her husband and my wife, she will leave this world almost seamlessly.

I remember a few tragic accidents of my boyhood, and children lost to friends. I wasn’t at my father’s bedside when he died, but I was there for hours before the night he finally succumbed. I’ve not been the same since.

In the town where I live, the death I’ll not forget is the passing of a high school senior who fell to a mysterious killer that took her slowly, while all around her hundreds of thousands of prayers rose daily. A teacher at the Christian school that young lady attended told me it was the worst semester he’d ever spent in education because the kids—unaccustomed to death and drawn like moths to the flame of deep emotion—simply couldn’t study. Their friend was dying, and no one—not even God almighty—seemed able to lift a finger.

Finally, months after first feeling something akin to flu symptoms, she fell to that mysterious disease—mercifully, I suppose. What once seemed beyond belief became, well, inexorable. But it took months. Imagine the endless, fervent prayers of hundreds of high school classmates. Imagine the minds, hearts, and souls of her two parents.

One of the most difficult lessons a believer learns in life is that sometimes God doesn’t answer our prayers, no matter how often we pound on his door or how arduously, even tearfully, we beg. Sometimes we just don’t get what we want.

Her parents worship beside us every Sunday. They carry wounds whose flow of grief in the last decade hasn’t abated. The death of their daughter must rise from the broad plains of their many years together like some black obelisk of cut glass. It will always be that way—until the day each of them are gone.

Life in that high school long ago returned to normal. Talking about what happened even a decade ago now would be as ho-hum-ish as a history lesson. The faculty back then are long gone. There may be a picture of her on a wall, but few students have any idea about her story.

Believers like me live in the assurance that assertions like this verse—“he heals the brokenhearted”—isn’t just cheerleading, even though we know mysterious killers stalk the countryside. Faith consents to the illogical assertion that somehow He will be there, even when he seems far away or absent altogether, that he will heal, that he will, forever and ever, bind up our wounds. 

Faith sinks its teeth in and tries to hold on.

 May the peace and joy of Christmas abide with you. . .

Barbara and Jim Schaap

Park Lane Improv

Okay, this little story feels for all the world like urban myth, but some stories just beg to be told whether or not they happened, myth being, at times, superior to plain old reality. In Calgary years ago, a man came up to me, didn’t identify himself, but told me, with some urgency, that he simply had to tell me a story he knew I’d like. He was right.

This is it.
_______________________

So Clayton was looking forward to the Christmas pageant because sixth grade boys, oldest in the program, would get the speaking parts. If he was lucky, he thought, he might get Joseph.

Didn’t happen. He wasn’t upset or envious, because there was so much joy at Christmas anyway–and the candy afterwards too. All of that. You just have to love Christmas, Clayton told himself, and he did. 

When the cast was announced, it turned out Mrs. Sperling chose Clayton to be the Bethlehem innkeeper. She’d printed out the lines that everyone had to speak, and then told them she thought it was going to the finest Christmas pageant Park Lane Church ever had.

Clayton had just three lines, and one was a gimme: “Can I help you?” The other one he knew too, just hadn’t thought about it much:  “I’m sorry, but I’ve got no room for you anymore in my motel.” And then the last:  “I can put you up in the barn outside.”

That was all of it. But from the get-go he wasn’t thrilled because he had to be the one to tell Mary and Joseph they couldn’t stay overnight, and then just to add to it was that Mary was, you know, going to have a baby yet that very night too. All the way home after practice that night, he groused to himself–why him?

The next week Clayton had no problem with his lines, even when some of the other kids stumbled or had to read ’em off the sheet. He was ready. They went over the whole scene four times at least, maybe more.

That afternoon Clayton’s mom asked him how practice had gone, and he told her everything was just fine. You know how moms are–she sort of kept at him because she could tell he wasn’t thrilled. Something was just wrong. “You look like you lost your best friend, Clayton,” she said. “Is there a problem?”

Shook his head.

“Okay, come on–just tell me what’s going on,” she insisted.

He thought maybe she’d laugh, and he didn’t want that. But he did want to tell her, so he did. “I don’t like my part,” he said. “I don’t like to be who I am.” He threw back his head almost angrily. “I’m the guy that says no.” 

She put her arm around his shoulders. “Ach, you’re not a bad guy,” his mother told him. “Poor man didn’t have any rooms, Clayton. Probably if he did, he would have given Joseph and Mary a soft bed and everything, maybe even a sundae before bed.”

He hadn’t thought of that. He looked up at her and kind of smiled. “Still,” he said, as if the hurt hadn’t left totally.

On Christmas Eve, all decked out, Clayton looked like some gent from the Bible–cape and sash and robe and sandals. First there was singing, lots of it; and then, when everything got quiet and the lights were lowered, the old, old story started, Mary and Joseph walking up from the back. Clayton stood right in front of a big cardboard hotel, his hands sort of folded like Mrs. Sperling said to do. Once Mary and Joseph were on the steps in front of him, he let go with that easy first line: “Can I help you?” 

“Do you have a room for us?” Grady Williams asked him. “We’ve been traveling a long, long ways and we need a place to sleep.”

The lights were down low, as if it really was night, like Bethlehem. He knew his line, but he didn’t like it, not at all. He looked around, even looked behind him. “I’m really, really sorry,” he said, because he was, “but there’s no room for you anymore in the motel.”

“But this is Mary,” Grady insisted, just like he was supposed to, “and she’s going to have a baby.”

There Clayton stood, the innkeeper, looking into Jasmine’s face that wasn’t Jasmine’s face at all, but the face of a girl on the brink of tears because after all they’d come such a long ways and there was no room for them in the inn, no room at all, and she was going to be having this baby, not just any baby either, he thought. She was going to be having Jesus.

He waited for a moment again, thinking that maybe he could think of something. After all, it was the Savior of the world, people said; it was Jesus who was going to be born, and the wise men and the shepherds and the animals and all of that–a really big deal.

He took a deep breath, wet his lips, bit ’em a little, and said, “I can put you up in the barn outside.” He said it as lovingly as he could, sniffing almost. Mary and Joseph looked at each other. And then he just couldn’t help himself. “Listen,” he told them. “Why don’t you two come in for a cup of coffee?”

Grady didn’t know what to say. He looked around for Mrs. Sperling, but didn’t find her, so there they all stood, and it was pure blessing from above that Clayton didn’t hear the chuckles from the crowd, pure blessing because he likely would have cried had he heard people laughing. But he didn’t hear them because he was, just like Mary, pondering all of this deeply in his heart.

Third row back, his mom giggled and wiped at her eyes with the back of her fingers. 

“Why don’t you come in for a cup of coffee?” Clayton had said, and it was, for Park Lane Church, the finest single moment of a wonderful Christmas Eve pageant that everyone talked about that next Christmas day.

Happy Saint Lucy's

 

[An oldie, December 13, 2013]

Today, in Sweden, a traditionally Lutheran country, most of the populace, I'm told, will go Christmas-crazy, having fallen in love a few centuries ago with Saint Lucy. It's Saint Lucy's Day in most of Scandanavia today, just as it is every December 13, a date roughly aimed at winter solstice, which is, of course, a date worth a good party if you're parked that far north in the hemisphere this very dark time of year.

Even the name, Lucia, feels as if it is has something to do with light etymologically, and when the people dress whichever young lady reigns this year--as they will today in schools, churches, communities, and even families, the Swedes outfit a garlanded crown beset with candles. Well, fire marshalls carrying the weight they do today, more often than not, what's aflame on all those blonde heads is created by batteries not open flames. But that violation of code is quite recent.

Martin Luther was no Calvinist in his rage against papist monstrosities, but that doesn't mean he held much regard for the museum of Roman Catholic saints. So the Sicilian St. Lucy is something of an anomaly in Sweden and Norway and Denmark and Finland, the only saint so lavishly celebrated way up north. Makes no sense. 

Even her origins are shrouded. One story traces her sainthood to the attention she showed to the Christians in the catacombs. Her ceaseless efforts prompted her to design headgear that could light the way, enabling her to use both hands to minister to martyrs. Viola!--St. Lucy, the saint of light.

Others maintain that she coverted to Christ and swore allegiance to the poor and to perfect sexual innocence, thereby incurring the wrath of her fiance, who reported her forbidden chastity to Roman authorities. 

When told she had to leave, or so the story goes, 50 oxen and 100 men couldn't move her. Seriously. 

Frustrated Roman authorities simply hauled in tree limbs and burned her right there. Still, flames 'a'lappin', she wouldn't stop praising the Lord. In fact, her unloving fiance took a sword to her throat to stanch the triumphant praise, and that didn't stop her.  She wouldn't stop until she was given last rites--or so the story goes.

Still, how on earth did young Italian Roman Catholic saint get past Luther?  And how did she get to Sweden in the first place, Sicily not being right next door?

There was, some say, a closet Catholic queen in Sweden; maybe she was the one who wouldn't give Lucia up. 

Yet another explanation involves those rugged sea-faring Vikings, who took her story back to Scandanavia.  

And still another explanation is that Santa Lucia simply fit in with pre-existant pagan Yuletide rituals already being celebrated among the common folk. It may come as a shock to Fox News, but people were giving presents, eating and drinking too much, and celebrating holidays at the end of the year long before anyone thought to rejoice in the birth of the boy-child savior.  

There is, after all, nothing particularly Christian about a  Christmas tree either. It could well be our trees and St. Lucy's garland crown share an origin in pagan rites. 

There's more.  Long ago, good old country pagans in Sweden were scared to death of Lussi, a scary female being who punished naughty children on December 13. Because she did, people got together and partied 'till early morning to keep her away, while in the barn, the animals spoke--really! The Lussi story, a beloved tradition, morphed splendidly into St. Lucy's Day because, given all the fun, even Luther himself couldn't steal it away from all those darling Swedish kids. Hence, the holiday.

The Dutch have Sinter Klaas, of course, and his so very politically incorrect, sooty-faced minions. And we've got Santa Claus, who turns his own tricks come Christmas Eve, visiting every last home in the world by way of chimneys most houses these days don't have.

Christians have Jesus, the baby, a God who somehow, some way, became a man--or rather a baby and was born, this king of heaven and earth, in a lean-to barn. You either belive or you don't, and I do.

But it's worth a smile or two to realize how human it is, right now--a couple new inches of snow on the fields just outside my window, our furnace running us bankrupt, the temps barely enough to move the mercury, darkness running halfway through the morning--it's worth a smile or two to realize how human it is to put up a live tree in the house, to party, to celebrate, to open one's arms and heart to the warmth of hope and love amid all the cold darkness all around.  

I believe in Jesus Christ, not Lussi or Swarte Piet, Sinter Klaas, or old St. Nick. But I sure love our tree and the bright green promise it offers so lavishly amid the dark of deep December. 

In so many ways, I reach, as all of us do, for the Light of the World.  

Have a nice St. Lucy's.

A gold-standard Christmas

Almost inevitably, they picked it out of a Sears Roebuck catalog. The J. C. Higgins brand name belonged to Sears Roebuck, and after the war they put it on their whole line of bikes. See that one at the top of the page, that's the one Mom and Dad bought. That they paid that kind of money for a bike for their little boy seems a stretch, but that Christmas obviously they did. 

I don't remember the light out front, but I do remember the whitewalls, the fancy, mid-ship tank--complete with push button horn--and the luggage rack, which never held luggage but often lugged buddies. 

I don't remember thinking that bike was ultra fancy. It wasn't a Rollfast, built for speed, or a Schwinn, the Cadillac of bikes. It was just an ordinary J C Higgins from Sears, the Walmart of the era. Still, I can't help thinking that Gilson Brothers must have forked over a healthy Christmas bonus that year, maybe 1956 or 57.

It likely wasn't my first bike. It was a 26-inch, full-size, after all, and didn't come with training wheels. Lakeshore Christmases were almost inevitably white, so I'm sure I had to wait weeks before actually taking a spin. I had some kind of spoked transportation before that Christmas, but that J C Higgens I will never, ever forget because it created in my heart the greatest Christmas ever.

It started with the Christmas Eve Sunday School program, the only service of the year when kids moved the podium off the stage and took the place over. Everybody got "a line," a verse or two to say when appointed, and I remember being scared witless about forgetting. Don't remember if I ever did. I was a kid before anyone risked candles, so there was no lights-out "Silent Night" kind of thing, but the kid program on Christmas Eve was blessedly special, as well as a test of patience and faith you simply had to get through in order to get back home and open presents. 

That bike and its fancy tank was the biggest Christmas present ever, and a real problem to hide. Wasn't about to fit under the tree in the living room, and there really was no place in the house where it could sit and wait for the ritual opening of presents. I don't know whose decision it was, but Mom and Dad did what they could to hide it behind that big red sofa against the west wall. Dad must have moved that thing out of the way to get the bike behind it, then realized the handlebars weren't about collapse. Maybe Mom had the grand idea of just throwing coats from the vestibule over it--add a couple of blankets over the back of the couch for a bundle, a cloud of stuff to cover the whole thing.

And it worked. That night, when I sat cross-legged beside the tree, I had absolutely no idea. There'd been nary a whisper about what little Jimmy was getting for Christmas. I had no suspicions and wasn't even hoping for a bike--it was December, after all, and nobody was going anywhere on bikes over those icy streets. Who was thinking of bicycles anyway?

Half-way through maybe, not before. I don't remember thinking somehow forgotten, so I'm sure that bike wasn't last; but at some appointed moment that Christmas Eve, Dad pointed to the hills of clothing and blankets over the back of the couch and directed me to peel 'em off. I was still in complete darkness.

But when I did, that Christmas moment became the gold standard. I was a boy, a child, a kid, and I had absolutely no idea it was coming. I was shocked, overwhelmed--that J C Higgins was about the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen or owned. I don't know that I could breath. Then Dad moved the couch again so I could slip that monster gift onto the living room rug where it took over the room.

There are fragments of maybe seventy Christmases in my memory bank, but none are as complete our bountiful as the year--mid '50s--Mom and Dad hid that brand new, white-walled J C Higgins behind the couch and blew me away with their love.

We have definitely scored some bigger gifts--inheritance checks that, decades later, silenced my wife and me. But no single memory will ever climb the heights that Christmas around the tree did, the moment Dad suggested I grab those silly coats from the back of the couch.

The story at the heart of Christmas is the blessed saga of a child in a manger, a newborn surrounded by gawking visitors, maybe even a lamb or two or three. It's a baby who is king, a king in a manger, but a child, a baby. 

Maybe that's why, a couple thousand years later, Christmas will always be a day for children. 

Morning Thanks--Winter Solstice

People I know have tipi rings on their South Dakota ranch, circles of stones visible only in summer, and then, only when cattle keep the grass down. But they're there, broad circles of half-submerged stones that mark the spots where, years ago our indigenous ancestors pitched tents, footprints of a different time.

Those friends claim there’s a long, straight line of stones in that pasture they believe points to the exact spot on the horizon where the sun rises on summer solstice. I haven't seen it, but I believe such things exist--ancient clocks to remind people that the times, they were 'a'changin’. Once the sun aligns with those rocks, people knew, regretfully, that winter was just over the hill.

Frederick Manfred, the Siouxland novelist, used to claim he knew where to find a similar straight line of rocks on Blue Mound, up the road in Minnesota. I never saw it, and you can’t always think a writer; but I’d like to believe it’s there too.

Who knows?--maybe there are more. Out here on the edge of the plains, we still unpack our thick robes once we know winter is on its way.

The Lakota kept their history on buffalo hides. Maybe you’ve seen ‘em. Somebody—the appointed artist, I suppose—kept track of calendar years by a single picture: a mule maybe, because that was the year some feisty donkey wandered into camp. “Winter Counts,” the Lakota people call those sprawling history book hides “winter counts” because the Lakota once counted their years by the winters they endured. Winter Counts. For the record, I have lived 70 winters. Now you know.

Out here, winter is the only season we can’t wait to end the day it starts. No area Chamber of Commerce cheerleader tells tourists that people die here in sub-zero temps, but they can—and do. Thousands escape south, but most of us live with ice cube cars, frostbit ears, and a drop of clear liquid on the end of our noses. When it gets cold enough, you don’t go out at all.

Long lines of solstice stones remind the people that it’s soon to be winter. It’s coming. Pull that buffalo robe up.

And then, right in the middle of all that miserable cold, comes Christmas. Right in the middle of all that wretched cold comes Hannukah, and right in the middle of all that hopeless cold hope itself rides up, the winter solstice, the flipside of the sun’s annual pilgrimage.

In the Netherlands, Sinter Klaas arrives; in Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic, St. Stephen. And Santa Lucia, candles in her hair and sweets in her open arms, comes to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.

In the middle of all that cold comes all that grace, all that blessed warmth.

The angels on high appeared to low-life shepherds in the Galilean hills

at the very best possible time, a night of endless dark and awful cold, even in Israel. “Glory, glory,” they sang, and the music couldn’t have come at a better moment because those shepherds had to be sick to death of winter.

And thus Jesus comes to those who follow him, just when we need him most, in the cold nights of our winter counts.

Not all of us believe in the Virgin Birth, cattle speaking in tongues, or a King in a manger. Not all of us spend our nights lighting menorahs for a rededicated temple. Not many of us dance madly on winter solstice.

But out here where the wind blows out of some unseen northwest icebox, my goodness! do we need the joy of Christmas. We’d be groundhogs without the blessing of that first sweet “Noel.”

Peace on Earth, goodwill toward men and women and children and all living things.

Every winter, just when a frozen world seems hopeless, hope itself arrives to wipe that bead from your nose and mine.

Merry Christmas! Happy holidays!

Morning Thanks from the Catholic corner

My sister gave it to me. She didn't quite know what to do with it, got it as a gift from an Roman Catholic friend. Through the haze of years, something in my sister harkened back to Sunday School, where she'd been taught that a crucifix is somehow Catholic. She could neither hang it in her home, she said, nor drop it in the garbage, and was relieved when her little brother took it off her hands. 

A big picture of Michaelangelo's Pieta is here in my Roman Catholic corner too, a world treasure featuring a Holy Mother in whose immense lap the body of Jesus of seems remarkably child-like. It is said the master used to come by St. Peter's Basilica at night just to stand before his sculpture, not because he was so proud of what he'd done but because he'd grown to love this bounteous Mary, mother of Christ. 

I don't believe this corner can rightly  be classified as a shrine. I'm sufficiently Calvinist enough to say I'm neither Buddhist nor Shinto and just a bit Catholic. What's here is a few religious icons in my Roman Catholic corner.

And there's a pen-and-ink I picked up in Old Town, Chicago, fifty years ago, an image of Christ as the hippie radical I wanted to be. It's not particularly Catholic, but it does suggest a similar Good Friday theme that, right now, is not at all Christmas-y. 

A meditation my wife and read last week reminded us that what is to come in that remarkable baby's life is no picnic romp. "Jesus was born," the writer says, "to suffer and die." That a thousand darling nativity scenes don't say that exactly doesn't mean it's any less true. Now's the time for a baby, pudgy legs and arms up as if he is just now beginning to measure his own reach. Now's the time for Mary adorned in adoration, Joseph, in determined silence, standing by and nodding to some song being played, the music of blessed faithfulness.

But there's no escaping the truth. This child is going to walk and sometimes limp through things that show here in my little Catholic corner. That baby was born to suffer and die for us, for me, "despised and rejected, a man of sorrows." It's not at all easy to draw those two narratives into one.

Small-town museums can be treasures if you arrive when some volunteer docent can give you all of his or her attention. Last year, I toured an immense nativity scene created in 1945 by Nazi prisoners of war in a sprawling camp in Algona, Iowa.

The guide was full of stories. If I lived closer to Algona, he could have signed me up for a few volunteer holiday hours myself. One story I'll never forget. He told me a retired pastor came in with two little granddaughters. He measured their height with his hands. "So big or so," he said.

Despite Grandpa's divine intentions, the little girls were soon bored, he said, and it showed. The story tumbled out. You docent long enough and you learn some tricks, he told me. He told them he had a game they could play. He and their Grandpa would stay in the museum, and they could go back into the nativity and count sheep. "You can't believe how many sheep those prisoners made that Christmas," he told them. "I'm not sure anymore how many are there, but there's tons of them. Count 'em for me, will you?"

Worked. They scampered back into the scene, spent some time quietly inside, then dutifully returned. "Thirty-four," they told him.

He knew how many were there--he'd lied about that--and he knew they were wrong. "So we all went back into the nativity because I had to show them they'd miscounted," he said. There were tears in his story-telling, but then the man loved what he was doing and what we were witnessing.

He went through them all, pointing to the sheep, one after another. "Thirty-three," he told those little girls. "I see only 33 sheep."

Getting out the punchline took some work through a lower lip that was way out of control and hands to hold back tears.

"But what about Jesus?" the little girls said. "He's the lamb of God."

They were not at all wrong
. From suffering his grace flows. "By his stripes we are healed."

Right here beside me there's an old plastic candelabra from the estate of an aunt who passed away a few years ago. Had to send away for replacement lights because it's a relic. But right now it's lit. It stands against a big window to the darkness right now, on one of the longest nights of year; it's light amid the darkness. 

That's his story and, most thankfully, ours.

Sunday Morning Meds--Heritage

C. C. and Neeltje Schaap

“May your deeds be shown to your servants, 

your splendor to their children.” Psalm 90:16

My Great-Grandpa Hemkes must have been the quintessential absent-minded professor. One Sabbath, before he came to America, he was so tied-up mentally with his theological meanderings that he nearly skated beyond the canals and out into the North Sea. His obituary suggests that, as a teacher, he was legendarily slack. Hmmm. But I also read that people considered him a grand storyteller. He lived to be 82, but he died of the diabetes he fought most of his life.

I can't help but find all of that somehow relevant, even useful.

His daughter, my Grandma Schaap, was an angel—and that reference comes from her own daughter-in-law. One characteristic of the Schaap family males is an almost unmanly sweetness, as if they’re a bit short on testosterone. That gentle character likely came from her. Grandma Schaap, I’m told, was never particularly healthy, but then she had ten kids, a not immodest sum in those days, of course.

Great-Grandpa Schaap tried to farm like millions of other Euro-immigrants in the later half of the 19th century, even though in Holland he was a seaman, a world traveler. But there was very cheap land in South Dakota, where he lasted just two years. He left Holland because the small North Sea island where he’d lived simply didn’t have a congregation of quite like-minded believers.

All of my ancestors—from immigration—were religious, very religious, which, when one considers the letters coming out of this computer right now—is itself a fact worth noting. I hail from a distinguished ancestral legacy of bedrock Christian belief in the Calvinist, or Reformed, tradition—and, of course, right now I'm meditating on Psalm 90.

But I’m sure some of those ancestors would wince when they’d read these pages. They carried convictions, placed stiff boundaries on Sabbath behavior, despised worldly amusements, and would have considered moving-picture shows, the descendants of which we watch nightly, the lusty work of Satan. They never danced, and if they played cards, it was likely Rook, on the sly. They meted out their love for the Lord almost militarily, created communities by preset codes of austere righteousness.

I am their child in many, many ways. I have no doubt at all that part of the reason I am writing these words is attributable to them and their faith. They are my heritage, and they were immensely pious folks. They are from whom I am.

But then, I am not my father, just as my son is not his.

Still, he’s got it too, my son, I mean—this predilection to believe. He has, just as I have, this goodly heritage, sometimes, his wife says, he can get more than a bit uptight. I want him to know something of his history and own it, for better and for worse. I'd like him to confess his faith in Jesus Christ too, to believe, as they, I’m sure, my great-grandparents wanted me to, even if they’d immigrated to glory long, long before I was born.

I know the impulse of this line from Psalm 90: “May your deeds be shown to your servants, your splendor to their children.” Every Christian does and has. We want those we love to know the Lord. It’s just that simple.

That hasn't changed.

The actual voice of the blogger

I suppose it's not all that strange to direct you to a website to hear my voice. After all, if you come to this blog with any regularity you hear my "voice" every day. In this case, however, we're not talking metaphorically. My metaphoric "voice" may well be as real as my actual voice--I'll let other people call that one.

But this time, this morning, I'm directing you to a podcast that features my real voice, a somewhat scratchy, Wisconsin-edged sounding thing in a podcast that features me answering questions from a good friend, Steve Mathonnet-VanderWell. It'll take you a while to get through--it's not a "quick listen"; but if you sometimes wonder about the soul behind the voice you hear when you stop by this blog, you just might enjoy the Schaap podcast.

Just click here. 

Just now at Sunshine Village

They've been friends for years, snowbirds, except for Madeline, who long ago just stayed in Florida and ended those tedious trips back up north to New Jersey. She and Bob finally said to heck with it, and just stayed down at Sunshine Village, even though Florida in July took some getting used to.

Audrey and her husband just rolled in again, and the two old friends were happy to reunite in the pool, where they exercised together late mornings, as they had for years.

Bob was gone for a decade maybe--Audrey couldn't remember exactly how many years. He'd died one summer, when Audrey and her husband were in Michigan. But the story she heard from Madeline that very first morning was that Madeline--who's 92 years old--was, once again "in a relationship," as the young folks like to say. That's right, she'd taken to hiking over to this new guy's trailer three nights a week or so; after which they just switched love nests, and she put him up at her place for the next three. Kind of a rotation thing. 

The two of them, Audrey and Madeline, are swimming, right? That's when the big sleepover news comes out. Now Audrey's been around, and she's never been much of a prude anyway. So when Madeline's story is told, she's quite taken, but she doesn't quit exercising. "No kidding," Audrey says. "That is so sweet." And then, "what's his name?"

"Bob," Madeline says, matter-of-factly, a whispery smile over her face. 

Audrey stops dead in the water. "You got to be kidding," she says. Bob was her long-time husband's name. "This one's a Bob too?"

Madeline jerks her bathing cap down a bit to cover her hair. "Yup," she says, "another Bob."

"My word," Audrey says. "You're making life difficult. How do you keep them separate?"

Madeline doesn't miss a beat. "One of them doesn't say much," she says.

And so it goes at Sunshine Village.

Mr. and Mrs. Cole in the blizzard

By 1870, thousands of Civil War veterans were putting down roots with land scripts that made endless miles of the broad land out here a real bargain basement. If Chancellorsville or Missionary Ridge, if Gettysburg or the siege of Vicksburg, if any of those were in your rearview mirror, you--and your spouse--were eligible for a dreamy 160 acres, sometimes more. 

By 1880, Nebraska was home to thousands of Civil War vets, men like Albert V. Cole, who, not yet thirty years old, had lived through a dozen bloody lifetimes before he crossed the Missouri and grabbed a plow. In addition, the man had been an orphan, his father having died when he was two months old, his mother as much as giving him up when he was ten. Little Albert got himself shuffled around from one house to another. "I had never had a home," he says in his pioneer reminiscence. 

Now Albert V. Cole's young wife, on the other hand, was but a filly when she came out here to the end of the world, a place where his darling bride missed her Michigan family dearly.

He doesn't say it in that reminiscence, but Cole was a warrior. He'd joined Company C, Fourth Michigan Infantry in 1861 and engaged in almost countless Civil War battles: Yorktown, Newbridge, Hanover Court House, Savage Station, White Oak Swamp, Ellison's Mill, Gaines Hill, Fredericksburg, Malvern Hill, Second Bull Run, Antietam. 

Albert V. Cole was a vet. Was he ever. 

He reenlisted in December '63, signed up with Custer's famous Michigan brigade, and saw more action at Todd's Tavern, the Wilderness, Beaver Dam Station, Yellow Tavern, Meadow Bridge, Mechanicsville, and Pomunky River, until he took bullet at Haw's Shop and was forced thereby to lie on his back for six months without moving, suffering, or so his biography says, "in the most excruciating agony. . .as gangrene and erysipelas set in."

After all of that, Cole set out to homestead Nebraska land. He'd blazed through more horror than any fierce Great Plains winter could offer, even the big storm he couldn't help write about when he sat down to tell his story. 

It was late Easter afternoon, and the bloodied war veteran had a wife for the first time, a sweetheart named Susan B. Crane, who, at just 19 years old, had never been "a thousand miles from her people," he admits, nor "separated from her mother" before coming out west to marry him. Cole's memoir doesn't as much as mention the Civil War, instead it goes on and on about that blinding Easter blizzard. 

And it's not hard to understand why. In the middle of all that howling, Mrs. Cole told him what was on her mind and in her soul: "she made me promise that if our house ever blew down, I would take her back to Michigan." Albert V. Cole, storied Civil War vet who went down during the seven-hour battle at Haw's Shop, was scared to death of a broken heart.

There's more. In that three-day Easter storm, things got complicated. The Coles put up some neighbors and friends in what amounted to little more than a three-room shanty. Those neighbors, a couple building their own place a half-mile east, had been out for a ride on a lovely Sunday afternoon when the storm hit. They needed shelter, and so did another family, so that the Coles' little shanty held six adults and one child. If you're wondering, the three women and the child slept together on the bed, the men went on the floor. 

That blizzard was no picnic, but Albert V. Cole's great worry was Susan Crane Cole. "Mrs. Cole almost prayed that the house would go down," he says, "so she could go back east." He can't have known that; but the almost in that memory suggests his real concern, and his love. "Almost prayed," he says. I can't help but think the man who took a bullet at the seven-hour battle of Haw's Shop, was a bunch more worried about his homesick wife than he was about some battering blizzard because Albert V. Cole--orphan, vet, pioneer--had a new and wonderful home that was, for all practical purposes, his first. "I had a home of my own and was delighted," he says, right in the middle of his description of that storm, "yet my heart went out to Mrs. Cole."

Yes, indeed it did.

It'll please you to know that Mr. and Mrs. Albert Cole had five children, and that soon after those first years Mrs. Cole's brothers and even her parents put Michigan behind them and homesteaded beneath the dome of sky in central Nebraska, where Mrs. Cole's own mother became a neighbor. 

That's a picture-book end.

First Snow and Luci Shaw

 

That we've never gone south in January is a fact that should not be misunderstood--neither of us love frigid temps and that evermore dangerous slickness that attaches itself beyond the reach of snow shovels or blowers or blades. Winters are more treacherous with every passing year. Yesterday, I almost went down on a my way to church.

Still, there's something stark, something beautiful about the first snow. There'd been a powder a couple of weeks ago, but even though Friday night's much ballyhooed blizzard didn't fulfill a host of prophecy, it left us with a couple inches of new snow, the first of the winter, and made it hard not to take out the camera even though I knew getting good pics would be tough. 

Enough fell for a fine alabaster quilt, so I circled the south pond and went down to  the river, only to discover that I'd forgotten how a couple inches of snow makes a two-mile hike more than a little wearying. But I wasn't wrong--truth be told, surrounded by all that angelic richness, there wasn't much to shoot at.

By March, nothing that you see here at the riverside will be worth lugging a camera, but this whole virginal first snow has a peculiarly divine character that's perfectly charming. The world's white.

First snow gives long December shadows even more character, don't you think?

But I wouldn't be putting these pictures up if it weren't for Luci Shaw's Christmas card for 2021. She always sends a poem, and this year's little gem, "Snow," compliments the world of the first snow just outside our door.

Snow

With what calm and gentle grace

last night's fresh poem of snow

was laid across the land, whitening the hills, 

filling the simple spaces between

the birches. Fallen snow is an easy essay

in quietude, in anonymity. And when

the Baby came--He who carved 

those hills, who designed each lacy branch

on every tree, who shaped that uniquely

gleaming signal star borne from high heaven--

It was He whose splendor fell to earth,

simply and quietly as a flake of snow

tp bring to all our troubled, broken world

his gifts of grace and beauty. 

To be sure, the first snow on Luci's home turf in Bellingham, Washington, looks nothing at all like ours; yet, by way of her wonderful wide-angle lens, differences smelt away. 

Consider her poem a gift, as it was for me, as the brilliant first snow was for all of us--and as it was, I'm sure, for Luci.

Christmas at Red Butte

[The sweet conclusion of Lucy Maude Montgomery's famous Christmas story (which I'd never read before last week!).]

Theodora, knowing that her assistance was not needed, and that she ought to get home as quickly as possible, went on her way as soon as she had seen the stranger in safe keeping. When she reached the little log house she crept in, cautiously put the children's gifts in their stockings, placed the turkey on the table where Aunt Elizabeth would see it the first thing in the morning, and then slipped off to bed, a very weary but very happy girl.

The joy that reigned in the little log house the next day more than repaid Theodora for her sacrifice.

"Whoopee, didn't I tell you that Santa Claus would come all right!" shouted the delighted Jimmy. "Oh, what splendid skates!"

The twins hugged their dolls in silent rapture, but Aunt Elizabeth's face was the best of all.

Then the dinner had to be prepared, and everybody had a hand in that. Just as Theodora, after a grave peep into the oven, had announced that the turkey was done, a sleigh dashed around the house. Theodora flew to answer the knock at the door, and there stood Mr. Lurgan and a big, bewhiskered, fur-coated fellow whom Theodora recognized as the stranger she had found on the trail. But—was he a stranger? There was something oddly familiar in those merry brown eyes. Theodora felt herself growing dizzy.

"Donald!" she gasped. "Oh, Donald!"

And then she was in the big fellow's arms, laughing and crying at the same time.

Donald it was indeed. And then followed half an hour during which everybody talked at once, and the turkey would have been burned to a crisp had it not been for the presence of mind of Mr. Lurgan who, being the least excited of them all, took it out of the oven, and set it on the back of the stove.

"To think that it was you last night, and that I never dreamed it," exclaimed Theodora. "Oh, Donald, if I hadn't gone to town!"

"I'd have frozen to death, I'm afraid," said Donald soberly. "I got into Spencer on the last train last night. I felt that I must come right out—I couldn't wait till morning. But there wasn't a team to be got for love or money—it was Christmas Eve and all the livery rigs were out. So I came on horseback. Just by that bluff something frightened my horse, and he shied violently. I was half asleep and thinking of my little sister, and I went off like a shot. I suppose I struck my head against a tree. Anyway, I knew nothing more until I came to in Mr. Lurgan's kitchen. I wasn't much hurt—feel none the worse of it except for a sore head and shoulder. But, oh, Gift o' God, how you have grown! I can't realize that you are the little sister I left four years ago. I suppose you have been thinking I was dead?"

"Yes, and, oh, Donald, where have you been?"

"Well, I went way up north with a prospecting party. We had a tough time the first year, I can tell you, and some of us never came back. We weren't in a country where post offices were lying round loose either, you see. Then at last, just as we were about giving up in despair, we struck it rich. I've brought a snug little pile home with me, and things are going to look up in this log house, Gift o' God. There'll be no more worrying for you dear people over mortgages."

"I'm so glad—for Auntie's sake," said Theodora, with shining eyes. "But, oh, Donald, it's best of all just to have you back. I'm so perfectly happy that I don't know what to do or say."

"Well, I think you might have dinner," said Jimmy in an injured tone. "The turkey's getting stone cold, and I'm most starving. I just can't stand it another minute."

So, with a laugh, they all sat down to the table and ate the merriest Christmas dinner the little log house had ever known.