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Originally published Dec. 28, 1997 in the Columbia Daily Herald
By Tim Wood
If Christmas is the "most wonderful day" of the year, the day after Christmas often is a close second.
The tree is still up, but much of the pressure associated with the holidays is gone. There are new toys to play with. For some people, business slows down. For others, such as those who handle returns at stores, things are still busy.
As I write this Friday afternoon, my day after Christmas is going well. It has had its ups and downs, but it's been a good day.
With some news staffers on vacation, I took on some duties usually done by others. Among those duties was laying out the news pages, which included detailed reading of the wire service stories. The day's stories gave a snapshot of the world. It was one of happiness, yet also of sadness.
I once interviewed the great radio commentator Paul Harvey, whose newspaper column was carried by The Daily Herald before Harvey stopped writing it. Asked how he got the material for his show, he said he simply read the day's newspapers. Here's my "Paul Harvey" take on the news of Christmas Day, 1997 (but there's no "rest of the story"):
One story profiled a young lady who inherited $500,000 from a man whom she befriended. The best news of the story was that she had managed the money well and had not let it ruin her life. Not everyone handles wealth that well. There are many stories of lottery winners, for example, who aren't very happy after winning millions of dollars.
Another story told of a man who was going to meet the parents of a teen-ager whose donated organ gave saved the man's life.
I can be comforted in the fact that I'm far from alone in working on a Friday after a Thursday Christmas. Yet another survey tells us that more people did that this year than in the last year in which Christmas fell on a Thursday.
In Detroit, a father was unable to rescue his four screaming young children from a fire.
In Louisiana, a woman lives with the reality that three of her daughters were killed by drunken drivers. She's trying to change a law she blames for their deaths.
In Colorado, they held a vigil for a murdered six-year-old beauty queen.
In Pakistan, wreckage was being cleared from a Christmas Eve train collision that killed at least 35 people.
In Hyannis, Mass., Santa Claus showed up with presents on Christmas Eve for a family whose house was destroyed earlier this month. Merchants donated the presents.
"Seinfeld" is going off the air, while evening television news shows seem to be regaining lost viewers. A connection? Probably not.
Survivors buried the dead from a massacre in Mexico. In Christmas Day car crashes, six people died in a Missouri wreck and a Tennessee wreck claimed four lives.
But out of all the tragedy and other news, one particular story tugged at my heart.
There's a stereotype of newspaper people that portrays us as being tough and cynical. Granted, in this business, you deal with a lot of tragedy, although we don't have it as rough as law enforcement officers, fire fighters, emergency medical technicians and others who deal with it first-hand. We do deal with a lot of it first-hand, though.
I supposed that since I've been a newspaper editor for 13 years, I should be pretty tough.
But a story out of Dresden, Tenn., broke my heart.
A 12-year-old boy got a bicycle for Christmas. Robert Curtis Brightman was taking his new bike to a market to get air in his tires when he rode into the path of a car and was struck.
The Friday edition probably would have been fine without the story. It was just two and one-half inches long, and there was plenty of news in the paper. But I felt compelled to put it in somewhere. It ended up on the bottom of page 2.
We've had two children in Columbia die in bicycle accidents in the past year. When I was eight years old, I rode a bicycle into the path of a car. The driver managed to avoid hitting me - but just barely. Physically, I was unhurt. Emotionally, I was traumatized.
I've got an 11-year-old son who is alive and well on the day after Christmas. I could not imagine the pain of losing him or my other son.
The family of Robert Curtis Brightman has to live with such pain. They will never see Christmas the same way again. Nor will the young man who struck him, even though he apparently was not at fault.
There will be another day, and more news. People will die, people will get rich. Lives will be saved, but others won't make it. Some folks will get their Warholian "15 minutes of fame." Celebrities and politicians will get their regular dose of news exposure.
Newspaper editors' hearts will be broken.
But today is the day after Christmas. The tree is still up and the lights are still on. There is a new Monopoly game to play with two healthy sons. There's Christmas music on the stereo.
And I thank God for all of it.The day after Christmas
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