Fr. Frank Remembers an early Christmas

You hear a lot of adults saying, these days, that Christmas is a so different.  We hear people state, “I can’t capture that wonderful spirit of Christmas that I used to have every year.”

I can remember during my early years that each of the three children would get one orange in our stockings that we had hung in on the mantelpiece on the eve of the Epiphany.  One particular year, my mother was acting very secretive.  My brothers and sisters and I perceived that something was happening.  On the eve of the Epiphany we found a tombola game by the hearth.  Tombola is a kind of bingo game.  That night we played the tombola and had so much fun.  We used the pieces of the orange skins to mark our cards.

We had already created our Nativity set.  The statues were made of the clay we found in the fields.  We placed the statues on a carpet of moss and the Baby Jesus was in a crib with the traditional straw.  None of our creation ever made it into a museum, and to tell the truth it needed a lot of imagination to tell what the thing was all about.  But we proudly invited our neighbors, especially the children, to share with us the joy that Jesus was born.