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    The Christmas Stories
    The Christmas Stories
    The Christmas Stories
    Ebook156 pages2 hours

    The Christmas Stories

    By Ted Field

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    About this ebook

    Christmas is our most beloved holiday. No other holiday is so richly decorated, seasoned by joy, and trumpeted with music. It is so big it must be celebrated in a variety of traditions.

    The Christmas Stories is a collection of twenty pieces that explore these traditions, sometimes with humor. The stories were written and read aloud by the author, one each year, at an annual advent worship service at St Stephen Lutheran Church in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, to not only entertain but to inspire readers and listeners to find their own Christmas stories to share.

    The stories in The Christmas Stories are a mix of fact and fiction but, regardless, address certain truths about Christmas we never question. For example, we know that every year we go home for Christmas, even if its just a journey of the heart, and that children agonize having to wait one slow day at a time for Christmas to arrive, while adults embrace the wait and even give it a name, advent. And that even secularists celebrate the holiday as the highest altar of peace, love, and joy.

    The Christmas Stories is meant not only to entertain but to inspire readers to find their own stories to share about this most beloved season.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAuthorHouse
    Release dateDec 5, 2016
    ISBN9781524653583
    The Christmas Stories
    Author

    Ted Field

    Ted Field is the author of The Well (a novel), The Christmas Stories (a collection of essays), and American Trail (a novel). He attended his first Major League baseball game in 1958 and in the many years since has been an avid fan enjoying the game played at all levels. After his fourth visit to Baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, Ted was inspired to combine his views about baseball’s place in our culture and history with what he read from great baseball writers like Roger Angel and Thomas Boswell, and write the definitive thesis that proves why baseball is the greatest game and our true National Pastime. Past the age of 70, Ted still collects baseball cards. He recalls advice he got from his father many years ago, when he told Ted on his 12th birthday that “ twelve is a tough age for a boy because he’s too young for girls and too old for baseball cards.” He wishes he could tell his father how mistaken he was, but admit that maybe a boy is always too young for girls. Ted and his wife live in Minnesota cheering for the Twins.

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      Book preview

      The Christmas Stories - Ted Field

      © 2016 Ted Field. All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

      Published by AuthorHouse 12/05/2016

      ISBN: 978-1-5246-5359-0 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-5246-5357-6 (hc)

      ISBN: 978-1-5246-5358-3 (e)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2016920157

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

      and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      The Stories

      Chapter

      Introduction

      Good Receivers

      Waiting for Christmas

      The Christmas Party

      Yes, Charlie, There Is A Santa Claus

      I’ll Be Home For Christmas

      The Christmas Program

      Where Have All the Shepherds Gone?

      Friends You Choose

      Christmas Bell

      O Holy Night

      This Little Light Of Mine

      White Christmas

      The Garage Singer

      No Room In The Inn

      A Christmas Carol

      Indestructible

      ’Tis The Season

      Away In The Manger—Part 1

      Away In The Manger—Part 2

      The Greatest Christmas Story

      T o the congregation

      of St Stephen Lutheran Church,

      White Bear Lake, MN

      Introduction

      C hristmas is our most beloved holiday. No other holiday is so richly decorated, seasoned by gladness, or trumpeted with music. We seem to behave better at Christmas. And even secularists celebrate the holiday as the highest altar of peace, love, and joy.

      What’s more, Christmas is a season, not a single day, which means its message of good cheer shines in the corners of our lives for weeks. Including Advent and the fact that the Twelve Days of Christmas don’t begin until the 25th, Christians celebrate for a month. It can wear us out. We may admit after all the presents are opened and the floor under the tree is carpeted with dry needles that the season is too long. The kids need to get back in school and we need a rest.

      Christmas is too big to be celebrated in one particular way. It is a kaleidoscope of rituals: tilt your head and you see something else to do. In no particular order, it is the exchange of gifts, the way kids revere Santa Claus, parties with friends, the gathering of families, hanging lights and decorating trees, baking cookies and exchanging cards, caroling and re-telling the same stories year after year, television specials, It’s A Wonderful Life, and Tiny Tim proclaiming God bless us, one and all. There’s much to do. Choose from the list how you want to celebrate your Christmas.

      I wrote the pieces in The Christmas Stories over several years as an intentional attempt to highlight as many of the Christmas rituals as I could—and discover a deeper meaning in them. Beginning in 1999 I was asked each year to write and read aloud a story for the annual advent service led by the senior choir of St Stephen Lutheran Church in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. I ended up writing twenty stories and all are assembled here.

      Because my assignment each year came without any conditions or restrictions regarding subject, I was free to explore Christmas’s wide themes and horizons, using mostly personal experiences. Regretfully, on occasion I drifted outside the limits of decorum, like the year I told a story about getting drunk at a Christmas party. But, mostly, the task has given me purpose to reach back and relive many pleasant Christmas memories of my own.

      Not all the stories are factual. Truthful maybe, but not factual. There is a difference. Truth encompasses things about our human condition we don’t question even when they are presented to us in fiction. As examples, we know that we go home every Christmas, even if it’s just a journey of the heart; that waiting for Christmas Day to arrive one slow day at a time is agonizing for children; that we are all one family at Christmas; and that the peace of Christmas can be more meaningful to those whose job is to preserve it. These are the truths about the holiday that can be told through works of fiction. Like Bible lessons, stories about our holiday traditions can be parables, too.

      I wrote the stories to entertain but also to create touchstones for my personal journey in Christian faith. Many of my holiday traditions—like yours—are of the Happy Holidays variety bringing great joy but with seemingly few connections to Christ’s birth. But I believe they all have connections. In these stories I have tried to show how each tradition is threaded with the real meaning of the holiday, which is a celebration of the original Christmas Story (yes, even getting drunk at a Christmas party has a faith message). That’s why I chose for this collection the simple title Christmas Stories. The love and humanity of the first Christmas are present in our modern holiday traditions. A holy night in Bethlehem, an overcrowded inn, a guiding star, the manger, and the shepherds and wise men who travelled there have meaning in all the ways celebrate today.

      We celebrate Christmas with friends and families, but it is also a time for personal reflection. All of us have our own special memories of the season, and one of my purposes in assembling this collection is to help you remember why the season is important to you. You have your own stories to keep. Write them down. Pass them on. They will always be special—and timeless—just like the original Christmas Story.

      Ted Field

      St Stephen Lutheran Church

      Christmas, 2017

      Good Receivers

      1999

      Figure%202%20Good%20Receivers.jpg

      T is the season of giving . And receiving. At Christmas we call it giving—rather than receiving—gifts, even though the transaction requires both. One doesn’t happen without the other. It’s like a game of catch, needing two people, one to throw and one to catch. But we don’t call it a game of throw. By its name, we take the throwing for granted and place the greater burden on catching the ball. The success is in the receiving.

      Giving gifts may be an important ritual of Christmas but I submit that more responsibility for a good Christmas gift exchange should fall on the receiver. Good receiving can be hard, particularly when it’s a gift that challenges the limits of your appreciation, like a tie resembling all the others hanging in your closet. It’s like a game of catch where not every throw hits you in the hands.

      My brother was an honest, if not diplomatic, gift receiver. A distant aunt once sent him a dress shirt that he didn’t care for. It was a nice shirt, but just too highfalutin for his Salvation Army tastes. When he told me he was impartial to the shirt, I remarked how much I liked it and he tossed it to me in a quick exchange of ownership.

      Here, he said. It’s yours.

      Fulfilling his responsibility to send a thank-you note, he took the honest path and confessed to the aunt what he had done, pointing out the double benefit of his act. He wrote that Ted loved the shirt while he was touched by the thought behind the gift, something he was able to keep. Two gifts for the price of one. A gift that keeps on giving.

      But in truth he got the better end of the deal. He received the genuine emotion from someone who cared for him, while all I got was the symbol of that emotion. The shirt wore out one day, but the emotion never did.

      Sometimes it’s hard to find the emotional intent. At those times it’s a challenge to remember that the thought behind the gift should be honored, rather than the gift itself.

      One of my favorite stories about Christmas receiving comes from a novel called Sometimes A Great Notion. It’s not a book about Christmas, but rather the story of a bunch of roughneck Oregon loggers, the Stamper family, led by older brother Hank.

      The Stampers were brawlers, attracted to fisticuffs and bloody noses. The exception was Hank’s cousin Joe Ben, whose charitable and optimistic nature contrasted sharply with the combative approach to life of the rest of the family, and Hank in particular. Joe Ben was kind and generous and believed everyone else was too. He had grown up viewing the world as a simple place filled with people of good intentions. He smiled at everything. To Hank and the others, Joe Ben had a tinker toy mind. During the day, as he worked amidst the roar of chain saws and crashing timber, he sang to the music playing on a transistor radio that hung from his neck.

      The Stampers were not rich, so there were never piles of presents under the Christmas tree. As loggers eking out a living in the woods, they didn’t have any trouble getting a tree, but decorating it was not always easy. So, every year when they were young, the Stamper boys got presents that were limited to whatever their stockings could hold: candy and yo-yo’s and marbles and such. But on Christmas morning every year Joe Ben cheerfully sifted through the spare contents of his stocking and expressed his gratitude that Santa Claus had once again included him in his rounds. He always saw good fortune in his gifts before anyone else did.

      Joe Ben’s unbridled glee irritated his cousins to the point that one year Hank decided to pull a nasty trick on him. As boys, they lived in the same house, and late on Christmas Eve, after Santa had come and gone, Hank snuck downstairs, careful not to awaken the others. He took Joe Ben’s stocking down from the mantle and emptied it and filled it with horse manure. Giggling to himself, he re-hung the stocking and slipped back into bed.

      In the morning the boys dashed to the fireplace. Joe Ben grabbed his stocking and peered inside. His eyes grew wide as saucers. Then he suddenly dropped the stocking and ran to the front door. Hank, holding back a chuckle, asked, Joe, where you goin’? What did ol’ Santa bring you?

      Joe Ben reached for a piece of rope hanging from a hook by the door and answered, "Brought me

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