X-Mas Thoughts And Memories

Kind of random but a refugee patient brought this back to Texas from a trip to Turkey. It is a model of Mayflower. It got crushed in transit. I told him it was OK- I would fix it. It was a frustrating exercise in futility and I tossed it in the fire and watched it burn. As if scripted, his contact information which was written in non native English on the bottom and addressed, "To my good friend Mr. Kevin..." was visible on the bottom of the stand for 90% of the conflagration process. I may be a monster.

• My mom loved Xmas like nobody I have ever met. It was consuming, pervasive and infectious. We were so poor I don't know how she did it but we all always had great presents, there was copious amounts of awesome food and the  shack house was always decorated. I recall only giving her one little gift as a kid but I hope I did OK for her. I can still hear her cries of , OoooOh!  Oh My! when opening some present she liked that somebody gave her and the way her face glowed with happiness.
• Sometimes I would get a present I had asked for the year before- after the fire for that had gone out. She must have saved all year and used layaway to get those things for me. God, I love her for that now. I hope I didn't act like too big an ingrate back then about it.
• Everybody knew as a boy I liked canned pears so one year my sister in law gave me a can of pears with a note that said, " Fly out to my car and get your present! "  
• I missed the note and just thought it was cool to get a can of pears. You cannot believe how poor we were and how unsophisticated I was.
• I guess you would say we were working class poor- dad always had a job but it was low paying.
• The present was a gas powered plane that flew around on a string .
• While looking for an obit for a person I was going to reference I happened upon the name of an acquaintance. I know all but one of his pallbearers. Also, I noted the death of another old friends dad. I think my generation is at that place where; we are aware of our mortality, our elder family members are old enough to be dropping like flies, we are still mobile enough to get killed in accidents, our behaviors have had time to catch up to us, our kids are old enough to get themselves killed and luck just generally runs out. We aren't so young that there are no losses, nor so old everybody else is already gone.
• I burn frankincense every year at Christmas.
• Was it George King that had the Christmas lights? Anyway, we loved going there every year. My favorite part was the Santa in the boat fishing from the lake- I lived for that and didn't care much about the rest of it. I thought my dad was hot stuff because he knew George personally. When we would come home presents would be under the tree from Santa. 
• I just realized- who put those presents out ? ! ‽