We have spent 50 of them together. Jean and I spent our first Christmas together as husband and wife in 1975. We were still newlyweds. We were still broke newlyweds. We had been married for six months. We didn’t have much and we didn’t get or give much that first Christmas, but it didn’t matter. We had each other and a bright future stretching out on front of us. Did I mention that we were newlyweds? We were young and much in love. Now we are not so young but still much in love…even more so than way back then.
I was in my third year of college, but my first at Samford University. I was majoring in religion and planning to become a pastor. I actually became a pastor before I finished my degree. Jean put her college education on hold and got a job doing clerical work in the School of Pharmacy at Samford.
Just like this year, Christmas Day back in 1975 fell on a Thursday, but Jean and I had already celebrated a couple of days before that. Earlier that week, she and I exchanged our gifts with one another…both of them. It wasn’t on Christmas Day, but it didn’t matter. One of the gifts Jean gave me was a blue 1955 Thunderbird. What I would I give for a ’55 Thunderbird now! What I wouldn’t give if the one she gave me had been real! It was, instead, one of those glass models filled with cologne sold by Avon. They are considered vintage now, but certainly not worth the tens of thousands the real thing might bring. After we opened our gifts, we loaded up my Thunderbird, excuse me, my Malibu, and made the 100-mile trek back to our families in Rainsville. There, we celebrated Christmas again with our parents.
For $75 a month, we lived in a small three-room apartment on campus. If you count the kitchen, it had four rooms. I didn’t include the kitchen, because it was about the same size as that bottle of cologne. Our walls were made of cinder blocks with a red-brick façade on the exterior walls. Our dining room was one corner of our living room. Our living room had a large picture window on the back wall. We could look out at a fence. We placed our first Christmas tree in front of that window. That was the first time in my life I had ever bought a Christmas tree. It was not a blue spruce but a blue light special from K-Mart. We managed to buy a string or two of lights, but we made most of the decorations. We crafted cardboard stars from McDonald’s cups. We painted them and put glitter on them while the paint was still wet. A couple have survived the years and each year since back then at least one hangs on our family tree.
Two-thousand years ago, some wise men made the trek from their far away home to the abode of the newly born messiah. There they found him and his parents in arrangements much cruder, and possibly even smaller, than our little student apartment. Because there was no room for them in the inn, the only begotten Son of God was born in a stable. His crib was a manger used to feed the livestock. Those wise men brought their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh for the Christ child. The Christ child brought them, as well as the world, his gift of salvation. Whenever, wherever and however you celebrate, may you have a blessed Christmas!
Bill King can be reached at bkpreach@yahoo.com or 334-728-5514 (office).
