Radio and television mirror (Nov 1939-Apr 1940)

Hotutojjet ■ Here is a way. as simple and beautiful as the Christmas story itself, for you to make the coming holidays the most memorable of your whole life of Christmas:. By Dr. Wm. L. STIDGER Well known writer and philosopher, and star NBC-Blue, sponsored by F/eJsenmonn's yeas*. WHEN my daughter Betty was a small child she used to notice the heavy mail which arrived each day in my mail box and wondered why it was that she didn't get many letters. So one day she called me into a private conference and said to me: "Now Dad, I want to know something. You get a pile of mail every morning and I only get a letter once a month or so. How do you get so many?" I said to Betty: "Well, dear, it's this way. I get a lot of letters because I write a lot of letters and if you expect to receive mail you will have to write it." "Oh, I see," she said, reflectively; "so you have to work for it?" "Yes, Betty. In fact, you have to work for anything in this life that is worth getting." So it is with this business of how to yet the most out of Christmas. You have to work for it. The best way I know of getting the most out of Christmas is to give the most to Christmas. The happiest Christmas I can remember in all my days is a certain Christmas in Moundsville, West Virginia, back in the depression— we called it a panic then — of 1892. My mother came from a wealthy Kansas family. My father had gone to Winfield, Kansas, from Moundsand found a job in a grocery store. One of the families which dealt in that store was named Robinson. They had a beautiful young 10 daughter named Etta. She came for the family groceries and met my father, fell in love with him and married him. By doing so she stepped out of a home of luxury into a home of poverty. Added to that poverty there were soon five children. I was the oldest of those five children. On this Christmas of 1892, my father was out of work and we were very poor. Mother came to me because I was the oldest of the five children and said to me: "Willie, Father has not had any work for several months and I'm afraid that we won't have much of a Christmas this year unless we have a homemade one. I'm talking to you because you are the oldest of the children and I'll have to depend on you to help Mother make a Christmas for the rest of the family." I remember agreeing with my mother outwardly, with sevenyear-old solemnity, but I also remember that it was quite a shock to me that I was to have to create that Christmas and not to be on the receiving end of the line. To my mother I gave a cheerful assent; but alone I wept over that prospect And so we started in to get things ready for that memorable Christmas. Mother and I together strung pop-corn strings to decorate the tree. We made simple little toys; we made candy. We went out into the woods and cut a tree. It was all a lot of fun and the smaller children did not know anything Illustration By B. Rieger | BADJO AND VISION M*» ■ Even today, when we children gather together for a family reunion, we always speak of this day as ' Mother's Christmas." about our plans for Christmas. Then one day in the morning mail there came a big, official-looking letter from Winfield, my mother's old home. The stationery came from a National Bank. I came home from school that noon and found Mother laughing and crying all at the same time. Then she took me aside and she showed me a check for fifty dollars which had that morning come from her brother, Uncle Will Robinson, the banker in Winfield. She read me a part of that letter. "Dear Etta: I happen to know that you have not had a new dress or a new hat in five years. I am sending this fifty dollars so that you may buy a new dress, a new hat and anything else that you want. I want this fifty dollars to be spent on yourself and not the children. They will be happy enough at Christmas time." One Sunday morning thirty years later I was telling that story in a St. Louis church. At the end of the story I said, more for dramatic effect than anything else: "And does anybody in this audience think that my mother spent that fifty dollars on herself?" I had asked that rhetorical question a dozen times in telling that story, never expecting and never receiving any answer to it; but that morning it was different. Suddenly a five-year-old boy who was sitting with his mother in that church popped up and in his shrill treble voice said, "No sir!" His reply was as much of a surprise to that audience and to himself as it was to me. I stopped dead still in my sermon; the audience laughed and applauded; and the boy snuggled up to his own mother and wept. He had been so moved by my story that on a sudden impulse he had answered my rhetorical question. Then when he realized what he had done, and heard that audience laugh, he was so embarrassed that he wept. So did the rest of us and it is safe to say that that Sunday morning audience has never forgotten that scene and that boy's "No sir!" For that boy knew mothers. He knew with a child's intuition that my mother did not spend a cent of that fifty dollars on herself; that she never even thought of buving that new (Continued on page 61) 11