Christmas seems to always steal in on me, reminding me again how fast time passes. Time seems to catch all of us unaware. It continues, relentlessly. Sometimes it steals our loved ones from us. Its passage causes us to age and sometimes steals our health and ability to do all we want to do. We talk about “saving” time and “making time count” and how “time flies” and sometimes we curse time because we can’t seem to get any of it back after it goes by. We even build better, more accurate watches and clocks (I’ve got an Apple watch now that not only keeps perfect time but will run EKGs on my heart — letting me have hints on how much time I actually have).

The Bible tells us that time will be no more when we go to heaven. Then we try to grasp words such as eternity and infinity. But getting more down to earth let me remind you again, it’s Christmastime. A magical time for the kids and for us oldies too. It’s a period of time we like to reach out to our friends and family — to see and greet — to wish them another “Merry Christmas” and tell them of our love and hopes for them all to have a “Happy New Year” while they’re at it.

I get the most responses to my writings when I write about things that went wrong in my somewhat convoluted life during this season for me. I guess if “wrong” things didn’t happen we couldn’t properly appreciate all the good times that come our way. One of my past favorite Topsy-Turvey Christmases I’ve written about is my Christmas in 1943. My dad always thought he had to go see his mama and daddy down near Wister periodically and especially on Christmas Day. A big problem in 1943 was World War II. Gasoline was tightly rationed. So, dad had a good friend over at Centrahoma get us ¾ of a tank of “drip” gas out in the oil field. “Drip” was the condensate off natural gas wells and it worked but smelled funny and made your car “knock.” To compensate, dad added about ¼ a tank of premium to the mixture.

Well, Christmas morning 1943 mom and dad loaded Gerald, Mana Sue, Linda Kay and me in our 1935 Ford V-8 and we struck out into the cold dark morning for grandma’s. We didn’t have our little brother Jimmy yet. By the time we passed through McAlester it was getting daylight and dad was fussing about how poorly the “drip” was powering our car and how much gas we had already burned. That was also about the time he noticed mom had pulled out the choke to have a place to hang her purse.

Whatever Christmas spirit we had quickly vanished,