Christmas Riches
by: Jon Crane

Saturday Ramblins, Vol. 1, No. 26 (December 12, 1998)

I've had more than a few lean Christmases. I've had a few where I was flat out broke. But, looking back, I've never had a poor Christmas because, beyond celebrating the birth of the Saviour, I've always seemed to have the richness of human love and human life filling my life.

I remember a Christmas back in 1966. At age 21, I was making very little money as an actor. I had a friend a couple of years younger than me, who danced for a ballet company and who was in no better shape financially. That Christmas, we tried not to let that stop us from having as good a celebration as anyone.

We had no money for a tree so we went to a tree lot late on Christmas Eve--the temperature so cold, our breath was freezing in front of us. After much pleading with the lot owner--Anna doing most of it with her large brown orphan eyes, he agreed to let us have one of his trees. After all, we reasoned with him, who was going to buy a tree at a few minutes after midnight on Christmas morning.

We carefully tied the tree to the top of my car--it was pretty skimpy and dried out. We were afraid by the time we got it home, there'd be no needles left on it. But we didn't care, really--it was our tree honestly begged for. We did get it back to my apartment with considerable needles on it and, because it didn't occur to us to get a stand, we had to lean it in a corner.

Anna took anything she could find in the house from bits of colored paper and tin foil to buttons and yarn and made the most beautiful ornaments I've seen before or since. She even cut pictures of ornaments out of magazines and advertisements, glued them to a backing and hung them with colored thread from the tree.

We were stuck, however, when it came to topping the tree. There was no angel or star and most of our makeshift materials had been exhausted. Finally, I hit on an idea. I had a beautiful, old cut-crystal bud vase. The base on it had broken, but I'd never gotten rid of it. We took that and inverted it on the top of the tree where it caught the lights from the room and reflected them like small stars.

We did something we probably never should have, but God must have been looking out for us in our youth and ignorance. We took florist wire and wired candles to the tips of the branches all over the tree. I wouldn't recommend doing this, but it was a beautiful sight when we lit them all and sat in the predawn darkness of our Lord's birth basking in the glow of the most beautiful tree I'd ever seen.

We exchanged modest gifts that year. I had found a flat, smooth river stone in a shop on which an artist had painted a woman's face. It looked uncannily like Anna. She bought a little music box in a second-hand store for me which played the waltz from the ballet, Cinderella. In a small dome on top, two dancers--a man in tails and a woman in a long gown twirled and spun as the music played. Later that day, we went to a cafeteria and got the turkey special, assured that we had as good a Christmas as anyone that day.

We were broke, but we were never poor.

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