Some priceless Christmas gifts ~ December 20, 1990

David Heiller

Christmas is a time of giving. Sometimes the gifts are worth money. Sometimes they are worth much more.

Take the gift of a phone call home. I called my mother last week, without really planning to. I’d just received a letter from her, and had written recently too. But I needed to talk to her.

I didn’t have much to say. Our Christmas plans, when we could meet in Minneapolis. She talked about the weather in Brownsville, the big snowstorm they had. Noah took the phone, and told her about his deer antler quest, how Grandma Marge at school had promised to bring him one. Then I took the phone again, lingering on small talk, until we said good bye.

After I hung up, I felt better. That calm old voice from home carried with it some inner strength that I needed. Now I realize that phone call was an unknowing gift from Mom.

How about the gift of a walk in the woods? We tramped down an abandoned township road on Saturday afternoon. Binti lead the way, sniffing for squirrels, criss-crossing into the woods on either side.

Binti was moving slower, but never 
turned down a walk, or a Christmas cookie!

It was a joy to watch her, because she’s 11½, and spends more and more of her time in front of the wood stove. She’s stiff in the rear, and almost totally deaf, but there she was, the old Binti, tail wagging, nose to the ground but always keeping us in sight with that radar that dogs seem to have, always knowing where they are and where YOU are.

I must have gone soft on the walk too, because when we stopped for a cup of tea and some cookies, we handed one to Binti. I repeat: WE GAVE A CHRISTMAS COOKIE TO OUR DOG. Never in Binti’s long history has this happened. She seemed to know it too, because she had the cookie chewed and swallowed before we could blink, like she didn’t want us to change our mind. Maybe she knew it was a Christmas gift.

Walks have a lot of gifts, like seeing a couple of deer take off from their snack of poplar bark, bounding across the trail in front of you, then watching a seven-year-old boy leave a slice of apple at that spot, for the deer to find as a treat.

Having that little boy’s hand fit like a glove into your hand as you walk, looking at tracks and searching the ground for the elusive deer antler. These are all great gifts.

I mostly did a ridiculous number of cookies myself,
but when I could get together with my friend
 Carolyn, we made sandbakkels. David loved them!

Cookies are, too. Cindy has been baking almost nonstop, with the help of us kids now and then: Santa’s Thumbprints and peppernuts, Russian teacakes and sugar cookies, rosettes and chocolate cookies.

The cookies seem to grow endlessly on the counter, row upon row, filling Tupperware and freezers and kids and dads. When I got up last Saturday morning, and saw a counter full of peanut blossoms, I thought for a split second, “Not more cookies!” But in the next instant, I came to my senses and realized, “You can never, I repeat, NEVER, have enough Christmas cookies.” Cookies are a Christmas gift, all right.

These are a few of those Christmas gifts that are worth more than anything you can find at the store. You’ve got your own special ones too, and I hope you enjoy them. Have a merry Christmas.

Christmas and winter are for the birds ~ December 29, 1994

David Heiller

My brother-in-law, Randy, and I were playing catch with a Frisbee on Christmas Day. Actually, we were playing catch with our dog, MacKenzie.

One of us would throw the Frisbee, and, Mac would race after it. Sometimes the Frisbee would float slowly over the snow, and the dog would leap and catch it.

The Frisbee was a gift to Mac from my sister-in-law, Nancy, who has a big heart with pets. MacKenzie’s acrobatic catches were fun to watch. They were her way of saying thanks, her gift back to us.

The turkey was on the grill, and the house was filled with the smell of dressing and sweet potatoes. The sun shined brightly on a 40-degree day, the second warmest Christmas on record, I learned later.

All of a sudden, the trees outside the house were filled with birds, chickadees, nuthatches, goldfinches, and grosbeaks. It was noon, and they descended on our feeders like it was time for their Christmas dinner.

We always have some birds around our feeder, but this was like someone had rung a dinner bell. They stayed for about five minutes, long enough for me to sneak in the house and tell my wife, Cindy.

Evening Grosbeaks

Cindy is a bird lover too, so she had to get up and tell me they were evening grosbeaks. I can never keep pine and evening grosbeaks straight. (Here’s a trick to help: evening grosbeaks are yellow, like the sun in the evening.)

I don’t know why those birds came in and left like they did. Some bird expert could tell me, but I don’t really care. Just watching them made that gorgeous Christmas day even more beautiful. It was like a Christmas present from Mother Nature.

WE ALWAYS HAD BIRD FEEDERS when I was a kid. I don’t think Mom bought much bird feed, because we didn’t have a lot of money. But any bread crumbs or cracked walnuts or hickory nuts or corn would go out to the backyard by the big elm trees. Grandma would fill grapefruit skins with peanut butter or suet and set them out for a special treat.

Lots of birds came, and all were welcome, except the sparrow. Grandma was a bird racist. She hated sparrows, which she called “sparrah” with disgust in her voice.

Once I got a BB gun for Christmas. I snuck up to the feeder and shot a bird. It was a sparrow, so maybe I justified the killing. Mostly though, Ι was responding to the instinct to kill that most 11-year-olds possess.

My sister, Mary Ellen, saw me, and came out and said it was wrong, unfair, and just plain rotten to shoot birds at feeders, even if it was a sparrow. She was mad!

Maybe it was a lesson about prejudice. All I know is I never shot another bird at a bird feeder, and I passed the instructions sternly on to our 11-year-old son when he got a pellet rifle last year.

My favorite bird was always the cardinal. It’s the prettiest bird in Minnesota. They would look flashy with their red coats against the white snow. Someone would holler for us to look whenever a cardinal landed at the feeder. Unfortunately we are too far north for them, unless you are lucky like Liz Espointour in Askov, who has three at her feeders these days.

THERE ARE A LOT OF LOGICAL reasons for feeding birds. You feel good feeding them, helping them survive. They are fascinating to watch. Each is beautiful in its own way, even the sparrow. Sorry, Grandma.

But there is a serious side about bird populations that we need to keep in mind, painful as it is. Laura Erickson of Duluth writes about it in her book, “For the Birds, An Uncommon Guide.”

This excellent book is written like a diary. Most days the author tells fascinating tidbits about bird encounters that she has had. But her December 27 entry is more somber. She writes: “When we moved to Peabody Street in 1981, our feeders overflowed with birds. This time of year we had scores of grosbeaks, hundreds of siskins or redpolls, several chickadee flocks. Twelve years later, squirrels outnumber birds, we’ve only two chickadee flocks, and the last two winters we’ve had no finches at all.”

On December 28, she writes: “The destruction of the rainforest is tragically obvious, but fragmentation of northern breeding habitats may be equally disastrous...” She goes on about all the forces that are causing bird populations to dwindle.

There is something you can do to help in this important fight, besides keeping your feeders filled. Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has a nongame wildlife program that you can donate to on your Minnesota tax forms.

Donations are used to help preserve wildlife species that are not traditionally hunted or harvested, but are in jeopardy because of habitat loss, illegal killing, or other environmental threats.

Last year six percent of all taxpayers donated to the fund. The average donation was $8.14.

Editor's note: Laura Erickson's website
https://www.lauraerickson.com/

1989 Christmas letter to Grandma ~ December 21, 1989

David Heiller

Sunday, Dec. 17, 1989

Dear Grandma:

We had our Christmas program at Sunday School today. I thought you might like to hear about it. You would have enjoyed it.

Miss Malika and her Christmas dress.

First the good news. Mollie and Noah said their parts without a hitch. Noah said, “Grant us now a glad new year” just as plain as could be. Mollie said: “But a lowly manger was his place to sleep.” The bow on her belt even stayed tied, and she only waved to me once.

The other kids were something too. Like Matt Peterson when he said, “He was wounded for our transgressions; He was bruised for our iniquities.” Matt said that last word correctly. He did NOT say “inquinities”. Matt was worried about that. When he practiced it around the Peterson home, he would say “inquinities.” Matt is the kind of kid who could come up with a pretty funny definition for “inquinities.” But not in front of a full church.

His big sister, Connie, had the toughest part of the pageant. She stood in front, jammed her left hand into an imaginary pocket, looked at her feet, then straightened up, and said her bit, four long sentences, 81 words, without a stammer. Now that was a REAL Christmas Program part, the kind I remember when I was a kid and you were watching me. Was I ever that good in sixth grade?

I don’t know why I like Christmas programs so much, Grandma. Remember how you used to like to sit in the waiting room of the parking ramp when we went shopping in LaCrosse, just to watch people pass by? Christmas pageants are like that to me. You can watch children pass by. Wearing new sweaters and dresses, or stuffed in double breasted suits and red ties, or blue jeans and AAU tennis shoes. And some of those kids, like Natalie Booker, so tiny she surely couldn’t memorize her part, yet she did, and better than most of the others. Some with changing voices, like Jeremy Kosloski, a 13-year-old bursting out of his clothes. Some suddenly pretty, like Corrine Cronin in her blue dress, growing up before your eyes.

Then there’s the music. Bev Peterson played the piano, and the notes just poured out when she did “Jesus, Name Above All Names.” The kids sang great too. That surprised me, because sometimes forget how well kids can sing, when they want to. Mona Sjoblom, the director of our Christmas pageant this year, asked me to play the guitar on “Away in the Manger,” and I gladly said yes. It was a different version, with a lovely melody that’s just about as good as the original. Even people who grumbled about the new­fangled rendition complimented me afterward.

What a joy it was to sit in front of those 25 kids and listen to them sing. Loud, clear voices, not all on key mind.you, but that was all right. They haven’t learned yet that they don’t all have perfect voices. I wish they never would. No one in the church complained.

One voice rang out over the rest, Joey Gibson’s. You can always pick Joe’s voice out at our Sunday School. Just follow your ears. It cuts through the others, it climbs to the high notes and reaches them. It tinkles like a bell on a Christmas tree, when angels get their wings. It’s a pure voice, a beacon that mixes with the other voices to make those four songs extra special.

Grandma, we pulled off a darn good Christmas program again. Isaac Sjoblom and Jonathan Zuk didn’t fight like they did in prac­tice. Tory Johnson missed a word, but went back to the beginning and said it perfectly. April Williams read half her part, then heaved a sigh and looked up and said perfectly: “God sent His angel Gabriel to tell Mary that she was to be the mother of His Son.”

Noah and Malika with cousin Sarah.
  Christmas, 1989.

Time stood still for an hour, and this crazy, busy holiday season suddenly didn’t seem quite so crazy and busy.

Even Mollie behaved. She didn’t come down to me when I was playing the guitar, like she did in practice, three times. And like I said, she only waved to me once, and the bow on her belt stayed tied. She tied it herself. Guess she’s growing up too.

And after she said her part, she came to me and sat on my lap. We hugged, and then we sang, “What Child is This?” That was pretty close to Heaven in my book.

I guess you know all about that though.

Love, David

Some thoughts on snow and Christmas ~ December 15, 1994

David Heiller

A friend called from Texas last Thursday, December, 8. She complained about the weather. It was 90 degrees, and everybody was suffering from the heat.

“Gee, that’s too bad,” I said. I didn’t mean it, and she knew that from my tone.

“What’s the weather like there?” she asked. I looked out the window. It was snowing hard. The wind was blowing too.

“Pretty nice,” I said. I meant that.

Things will even out for her. There will be days when it is 35 below zero here, and it will be 70 degrees there. She will get the last laugh.

But I wouldn’t trade our winter for Texas even if I was retired or independently wealthy or both.

We drove home through a nasty blizzard on November 29 this year. Twelve and a half hours from Chicago to Sturgeon Lake, through rain and sleet and ice and finally, close to home, a blizzard.

It was hard, and dangerous, and a few people thought we were foolhardy.

I don’t think so. That’s winter here. Sometimes you take chances with it. In a perverse way, that’s one of the things I like about winter.

We don’t face saber toothed tigers any more. Most of us don’t even climb mountains or shoot rapids. But by golly we can drive through a snowstorm.

When you take a chance and face adversity and win, it makes you stronger. That’s an old-fashioned idea, but that doesn’t make it any less true. You only have to read accounts from our forefathers who settled this country to know it’s true.

We have some old family pictures taken in about 1960. Our car is parked on the other side of the street. It is almost completely covered with snow. That’s where Mom had left it.

She had come home from Minneapolis on the train with my sister that day. When they got to LaCrosse, a snowstorm had hit.

It was 13 miles to home. The last seven miles she followed the tire tracks of a Brownsville man who had chains on. The highway was closed after they got home.

Noah outside the front window.

She got to Brownsville, then pulled over across from the house, left the car, and trudged in with Lynette.

You mark the passage of time with storms and experiences like that. I’ll always remember driving home through a blizzard on Thanksgiving eve, 1983. It was the day of my Grandma Heiller’s funeral. We made it, barely, and my wife and I still talk about it as the worst weather we’ve ever driven in.

And who can forget the Halloween blizzard of 1991, five days after the Twins won the World Series? Three feet of snow in one storm.

The first snow is hard. Breaking out winter coats, putting on boots. Finding the ice scraper under the car seat where you threw it last spring, and scraping ice off the windshield. Warming the car up in the morning before you get in. Hauling in firewood. Shoveling snow.

For a few minutes, you wonder why you put up with this.

Cross country skiing is one of the things that make 
us love winter, though in later years 
we became avid snowshoers.

But then something clicks, and you accept it, and even start to enjoy it.

You break out the skis or snowshoes or snowmobile. Throw an orange in the backpack, and sit on a log in the woods with your kids and wife and dog, and eat that orange. Man is it tasty! Your mouth waters just peeling it.

And there’s no feeling like early December, after the first snow, when the sun is shining and the house is bright with its soft light, and you know Christmas is just around the corner.

Christmas without snow just isn’t Christmas. It’s basic to our nature. Mom, apple pie, baseball, the Vikings, and a snowy Christmas.

I spent two Christmases away from snow in Morocco. I remember walking under the brightest moon I’d ever seen on Christmas Eve and thinking, “Jesus was born 1,977 years ago, about a thousand miles due east, and maybe a night like this.”

It was warm and dry and shepherds were watching their flocks up in the hills. Oh it, beautiful, and oh it was lonely. Partly I missed my friends and family, and partly I missed the woods and the river and ice skating and snow.

If there’s one problem with the Christmas story, and I did say if, it is that Jesus was born in the desert. He should have been born in Αskov or Willow River or Finlayson, or even Rutledge.

Not only should there have been no room in the inn, it should have been 20 below zero. That stable would have really been cozy, with ox and lamb blowing steam into the air like dairy barn at milking time.

And it should have been snowing outside, big white flakes that would float down like feathers.

Those of us who want to rewrite history, who love snow, will sing a different tune in about two months. We’ll wish for spring in February and know it is two months away. We’ll hit a few 40 below nights and remember why some of our friends do go to Texas and Arizona for the winter.

But that’s about the time those folks are thinking about heading home to Minnesota. Home, where it snows.

The magical seaon is here ~ December 14, 2005

David Heiller

Cindy called me to the window on Saturday morning. “Look at the deer,” she said. A couple of does were making their way down the hill, taking their time, nibbling here and there.

Snow sifted lightly over them, over the deck and woods, adding another coat to the start of this very fine winter.

Very fine winter? If you question that sentence, head to Arizona. If not, then Saturday had it all.

Not just the deer in the woods, but the birds milling around the feeder. Even they seemed happy. And people did too.

Across the road, Duane Thomford was checking in on his old stomping grounds. He has a bachelor pad on wheels out in the field next to some unharvested corn. It’s not a bachelor pad in reality, since Marilyn is very much alive and well. But it’s not a place that Marilyn or most other women I know would fall in love with. It’s basically a shed on wheels, with a bunk bed and an old trash-burner for furnishings. But there are windows on all four sides, great for watching coyotes and deer and turkeys and neighbors like me. Best of all it’s in the middle of a piece of paradise that Duane knows better than anyone. Add those silent snowflakes that wouldn’t quit falling, and it was a heavenly spot last Saturday. Duane didn’t say that, but it was there, in his eyes, in the way he relaxed against his truck. Happiness. Winter. They go together.

In town, I stopped to see Vance Mitchell, and found him getting out the Christmas decorations, with the able assistance of Julie and Matt. Or more likely it was Vance doing the assisting. That’s the way it is with Christmas decorations, at least at our house. The Mitchells already had their inflatable snowman set up outside, ready to rise up and greet the travelers on Highway 26.

Up the street, Dan Moriarty leaned against a snow shovel in his yard, talking to a neighbor across the road. “Got your decorations up yet?” he asked me, but not really waiting for an answer, because he put his up a week ago, and there was a little pride in that old truck driver’s voice when he told me that.

“You probably never took them down from last year,” I countered. That brought out Dan’s familiar guffaw. Either that or Mary Ellen put them up for him. But I didn’t say that. Those old bachelors can get touchy sometimes.

A red bellied woodpecker at a suet feeder.

I stopped at the Meiners’ house to pick up some suet. Maureen greeted me at the door with her friendly smile. “The birds are so busy, must be a change in the weather coming,” she said, and I could tell that that wouldn’t bother her at all. Bring on the winter, those tough old Langes believe.

Even at Mom’s, winter was settling in just fine, thank you. Cindy brought up the little Christmas tree that had waited patiently in the basement for 11 months. They put on a few of the old ornaments. That gave me a chance to admire the decorations left in the box. They won’t fetch any money on Antiques Road Show. But they are priceless in the eyes of the former kid that once put them up. Those silver and gold ones that look like miniature disco balls when you give them a spin. The balls with silhouettes cut out of deer and Santa and candles. Even the plastic ones are special. Old and faded, the tiny ribs on their surface worn smooth by many hands many years ago.

Cindy and I headed home late in the afternoon. We drove past the Helke farm, its muted red barns the only color in the black and white landscape. The snow kept falling, clinging to the dark tree branches.

It was a magical time at a magical season, the one that always hits in early December, before Christmas. Saturday was the day.

Anyone who doesn’t think winter is beautiful hasn’t driven the back roads of Houston County in the fading light of a snowy December afternoon, with Christmas just around the corner. You can ask Duane and Vance and Dan and Maureen and Mom and Cindy if you don’t believe me.

Bring on the tree, and Christmas ~ December 13, 2001

David Heiller

It hit me in the early morning hours last Sunday that it was time. I had tossed and turned for a couple days over it, waking at about 4 a.m. and then not really falling asleep again.

Momentous decisions are like that, and this was a monster.

It was time to cut the Christmas tree.

Poor George Bailey
 eventually found his cheer.

I hadn’t been ready before Sunday morning. The spirit of Christmas was taking its own sweet time to arrive for me, as usual. I had grumped around the day before, as we dug out the decorations. Why do we have to go to all this fuss? What’s the big deal? George Bailey would have been proud.

Cutting the tree helped change that.

We always cut our own tree from the woods near our house. It’s not the same as going to a tree farm. Those trees are different. They are full and shapely. They could pose in the center-fold of TreeFarm Quarterly. Most important, they don’t lose their needles.

Our trees are regular trees. They look like your friends. Not perfect, but solid, and with a good heart. Maybe a little lumpy, and their hair thinning. That’s our tree.

Four-year-old Claire reminds us that even
 the most lop-sided tree can inspire dancing!

Timing is everything when you cut your own tree, because of the needle factor. If you cut your tree early, it can look pretty bare by Christmas. There is no worse sound than when you brush up to a fully decorated Christmas tree on Christmas Eve and hear needles tinkling to the floor by the hundreds. One wag of a happy dog’s tail can denude a tree like that. I speak from experience. Spruce trees are the worst.

Decisions, decisions!

These kinds of thoughts flickered in the dim dawn light on Sunday, until I sat up and announced the time had come.

A couple hours later, we headed into the woods: wife Cindy, son Noah, friend Kendra, and me. I had seen a good balsam tree last year, so we looked for it first. I thought it would jump out at me, The Perfect Tree, relatively speaking. But it didn’t. I might have spied it, but it didn’t look any better, just another year older (like those friends I mentioned earlier). We kept walking, through thick brush, over deer trails, looking at this tree and that.

Our back woods trees were generally quite nice. 
A hole? A good place the the bigger decorations!
A flat spot? Oh yay! It will slide closer to the wall!
The needles ALL fall off in the first week? 
Well, it  makes for a good fire-side tale anyway!

“We could cut the top off that one.”

“It’s too thin. How about that one?”

“It’s got a big hole in the middle.”

“That one isn’t bad.”

“It isn’t good either.”

Finally Kendra spotted a nice one. She called us over. We circled it warily. It would do just fine. But it wasn’t quite right.

We kept moving, eyeing dozens of more trees. None came close to Kendra’s.

Then I spied the winner. It’s funny how you know something is right when you see it. That was how I felt. I called the other jurors over, and they agreed. It had that extra special look, as symmetrical and full as a balsam tree in the wilds of northern Pine County can be. And it was right next to the logging road, so we wouldn’t have to drag it through the thick brush.

Noah and Grace: under the tree, a pleasant place to be.

Then I spied the winner. It’s funny how you know something is right when you see it. That was how I felt. I called the other jurors over, and they agreed. It had that extra special look, as symmetrical and full as a balsam tree in the wilds of northern Pine County can be. And it was right next to the logging road, so we wouldn’t have to drag it through the thick brush.

I cut it down, using an old cross-cut saw that only gets used for this occasion. I felt a pang of regret cutting the tree, but it passed like the wind. There is no shortage of trees in our woods, and this tree would not go to waste in the spiritual sense. Quite the contrary. It will enrich our Christmas, just as it did our lives last Sunday morning when we cut it.

Noah, Cindy, and I carried it in, while Kendra carried the saw. The sun shone on the ground that was sprinkled with frost. The woods were sparse and brown, yet with a special beauty that only comes this time of year. Cindy pointed out an old maple tree that had partially fallen down several years ago. It used to be the best maple tree for giving sap, Cindy told Kendra. It succumbed to old age, and I cut it up for firewood. Waste not, want not.

When we got to the house, our simple job was over. I wished it could have lasted longer. We had missed church because of it, but we had gained a beautiful tree, and something less tangible but just as valuable.

The spirit of Christmas had returned for me. It’s all downhill from here.

Eating your way through Christmas ~ December 16, 1993

David Heiller

The scale in the corner of our friends’ house stood there like the dashboard of a 1958 Studebaker, big and solid with a face that wouldn’t give away a good poker hand.

I stepped on it Sunday night, and the needle rose like the speedometer of a hot rod Lincoln to 220. I stepped off, then on again. 220.

The Beast

“Is this a good scale?” I asked Kevin, trying to keep a calm voice.

“Yeah, if anything, it’s a little light,” he said. Gee thanks, Kevin.

I’ve been avoiding scales lately, like a sinner avoids a church. It’s Christmas, and if Christmas means anything, it means gaining weight.

I had dropped 10 pounds off my 220 pound body over the past three months. In fact, the scale even hit 206 a few times.

That may not seem like much to John Domogalla, who can drop 100 pounds just by not eating after six p.m. But to me, it was a major mid-life victory.

And now, stepping on The Scale That Doctors Recommend, I see 220 again.

Ah, Christmas.

It’s a time when people my age pat their stomachs and laugh nervously and say things like, “Υup, every year, I gain another five pounds at Christmas.”

Carolyn and I making sandbakkels. 
These delights are best when made with a friend, 
and when consumed by an appreciative audience.
 I always had that with David!

It’s a time when wives get together and make sandbakkles, which are sugar and butter mixed together with a little flour thrown in to give it a brown color. The wives are expected to make cookies like this, and the husbands are expected to eat them and a good husband always lives up to his expectations.

It gets better. Chocolate cookies from my Grandma Schnίck’s recipe. I have to eat those, otherwise Grandma will get mad up in that Great Kitchen in the Sky.

Sugar cookies with frosting and sprinkles. The kids help make those, so I have to eat them or I’ll disappoint my little children and scar them for life.

Russian tea cakes. Have to eat them to be politically correct.

Hazel Serritslev’s peppernuts. Grab a handful; shove them in your mouth like a squirrel with sunflower seeds. Take a big swig of milk, swish it all around, and start chewing. Danish heaven.

Peanut kisses. They go great with a cup of coffee in the car on the way to work.

Don't forget the annual cookie decorating
 jamboree with the nieces and nephew!

And that’s just the cookies. There’s staff dinners and suppers, church potlucks and parties, and dining out at your local restaurant.

And don’t forget the bowl of mixed nuts on the counter. Filberts, English walnuts, pecans, almonds, and (last, but not least), Brazil nuts. Boy, are they fun to crack. Once you crack them, it’s a shame not to eat them.

I could go on, but you get the mid-drift. The scariest part is that Christmas is still nine days away. And New Year’s comes after that. Look out for the food that’s coming. It will hit you like a midnight freight train.

Thank goodness we have a more generous scale than our friends’. It’s digital. The numbers can’t seem to make up their mind. Cindy steps on it gingerly, like a cat sneaking up on a mouse, and it gives a kind reading. It’s amazing how that can make a woman smile. I clomp on it in the morning, half-asleep with a stiff back, and it gives a blunter answer.

It said 214 Monday morning. I stepped off, then on again. That sometimes shakes a couple pounds loose. 214.

But it wasn’t 220! Heck, that wasn’t so bad. I had lost at least six pounds overnight. And I was holding my boxer shorts in my hand. They weighed at least two pounds.

Look out peppernuts, here I come.

A Christmas letter to Grandma ~ December 19, 2002

Dear Grandma:

Here it is, Christmas once again. Seems like just a year ago that I wrote a letter to you. Hey, I guess it was a year.

I know I shouldn’t put on my rose colored glasses and remember you and the Christmas of old. But I can’t help it for just a few minutes. How can I forget those chocolate cookies? Cindy still makes them, from a recipe card with your familiar writing. Or the way we sat in church on Christmas Eve and sang Silent Night. You had to caution me to be careful when I lit my candle. I probably rolled my eyes.

Then at some point, as we ripped through our presents, you would tell about getting a big orange when you were a girl in Nebraska, and how good that orange smelled and tasted. I thought it was boring then, but I still remember it now.

I could go on, but that will carry me through for a while. It’s not a bad thing to remember the old days at Christmas time, as long as you don’t dwell there. Α friend of mine, Red Hansen, wrote a poem about his folks about 20 years ago that his daughter, Arla, sent with her Christmas letter. I’d like to share it:

Beautiful Night

by: Red Hansen

How bright the night, how bright the stars, the crunching snow, no sound, no cars. How still the night.

The dog stands quietly, tail a-wagging, wondering why the master was lagging with the path in sight.

Thirty-five years since my dad walked here on a wooded path he held so dear, on just such a night.

My feet led me on where the house used to be, almost, yes almost a house Ι could see, with the windows alight.

Inside would be Mother, the supper cooking. For Dad and I, she would be looking. The Christmas tree bright.

There were candy and cookies and food galore, and family love. Who could need for more? On just such a night. Oh, what a night.

Α nudge on my leg to let me know my dog was impatient. Time to go.

I bet Red’s parents enjoyed seeing him at Christmas as much as he did them. Maybe you have met them Up There.

David and Red making sweet Christmas music.

Red brightened my Christmas this year too. I was going over some songs to play at a St. Lucia church program last Friday, and I found a sheet of paper called “Christmas Songs w/Red.”

There was a song called “Beautiful Is the Heaven’s Blue.” I looked it up in the hymnal but it wasn’t there. That didn’t totally surprise me, because Red has a way of giving songs his own titles based on his Danish translation and the poet in him.

I called him up and asked him how it went. He hummed the whole song. It was familiar and beautiful.

“Does it have a different name?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Hey Hedda does that song have a different name?”

“What song?” I heard Hertha holler back

“Beautiful Is the Heaven’s Blue!” He started humming it to her. Hertha didn’t know either.

I thought it would be an unsolved mystery. But soon the phone rang again, as I had a hunch it would. This time Red had called in the big gun, in this case Arla, who is carrying on her dad’s tradition as human computer of songs and hymns. “Look on page 75 of the hymnal,” she said. “It’s called ‘Bright and Glorious is the sky’.”

There it was, note for note as Red had hummed it, and as I had sung it, perhaps with you by my side back in those rose-colored years when I was eight and it was always snowing.·

It was a great discovery. Finding an old Christmas hymn is like finding a silver dollar. If I hadn’t met Red, if he hadn’t taught so many songs, if I hadn’t seen that old list, if I hadn’t called him, if he hadn’t asked Arla, I would have been a bit poorer this Christmas.

I played it for the ladies at St. Lucia, and they loved it. Then I stopped at the nursing home on the way home and played it for an old friend. She can’t talk anymore, but her smile told that she liked it too.

Music is one of those things that gives life and strength. And it keeps giving. It’s a big part of Christmas, and one that I know you always enjoyed. Maybe you still do. I’ll be thinking of· you as I play them this Christmas season.

Love, David