Lauderdale: The greatest Christmas gifts are not under the tree
It wouldn't do me any good this year anyway because we have a puppy. Eddy opens presents as soon as he sees them, so ours are found on top of the refrigerator with the fly swatter and out-of-date Wendy's coupons.
To Eddy, the whole world is a present. And I think he's got it right.
In my childhood, when visions of presents kept us awake at night, Mama was the main gift-giver.
Ours was not a house with presents stacked high around the tree and spilling into the next room. But Mama tried to get that certain something our little hearts desired.
Once it was a genuine leather football. Once it was a whole football uniform. And then there was the year it was a set of weights. That's a joke if you've ever seen my pencil arms. But Mama trudged up from the basement with all those weights, in trip after trip on Christmas Eve night, sounding like a Charles Dickens ghost in chains -- all because her child said he wanted it.
Christmas came with many other presents. It's when Mama made potato rolls and added pineapple juice to the iced tea. She made fruit cake from graham cracker crumbs that doesn't have to be cooked. And there were candles and tinsel that we called icicles and carefully removed each strand and put it away for next year. At night, when the living room was dark, I'd squint my eyes to make the Christmas tree lights even more magical. Now I don't have to squint for things to be blurry.
And now I can say that a Christmas gift from my father has lasted much longer than the things on my childhood wish list.
His gift wasn't wrapped and placed under the tree.
It was a piece of shiny black vinyl pulled from a gold and blue record cover and played on a little hi-fi. It was the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performing Georg Friedrich Handel's "Messiah."
The sacred oratorio first performed in 1742 was done anew last Sunday by a volunteer community choir on Hilton Head Island. It's one of the community's oldest traditions -- and gifts.
All these years later, its tunes and words still give the feeble-voiced like me the strength to get up and boom from the diaphragm: "And His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace."
My tradition is to play it while putting up the Christmas tree lights. It keeps a little civility in that annual love-hate tangle.
Oh, we've got presents flying to loved ones across the world even as we speak.
But our main gift this year is Eddy. And his innate understanding that gifts don't have to come in green and gold wrapping.
Follow columnist and senior editor David Lauderdale at twitter.com/ThatsLauderdale and facebook.com/david.lauderdale.16.
This story was originally published December 15, 2015 at 4:27 PM with the headline "Lauderdale: The greatest Christmas gifts are not under the tree."