Legacy MattersOne Advent and two Christmas tales to pass along.
The Advent of the Three Miracles
You will understand why I felt a glowing sense of almost giddy joy and exultation that Christmas. Nothing comes closer to expressing how I felt on that Advent Sunday 20 years ago than the inspired scene from the 1951 Alastair Sims Christmas Carol when Ebenezer Scrooge wakes up on Christmas morning. "
I'm as light as a feather, I'm as happy as an angel, I'm as merry as a school boy, I'm as giddy as a drunken man."
A tiny foretaste of the happiness for we have all been created.
Hans A. von Spakovsky recalls the brutal Christmases in Germany during and at the end of WW2, in a family story that will be handed down for generations, A Christmas Tale - 1944
My grandmother always enjoyed Christmas -- not because of the gifts, but because her family was together and safe. She had learned to enjoy the time you have with the people you love. She also knew that no matter what the future brings, you can find your way out of almost anything if you don’t give up hope. And she was confident that her grandchildren would never experience in America what her family had endured in Nazi Germany.
My grandmother taught me by her example that determination and optimism can take you almost anywhere, no matter what obstacles you face. Even what appears to be a terrible blow can sometimes turn out for the best. As we celebrate a holiday that is about the birth of hope and salvation, I remember that lesson and am thankful that my family came to America, a nation of new beginnings. It has been a refuge for more than 200 years for immigrants fleeing the tyranny and darkness that pervades so many other places around the world. Merry Christmas!
Tony Woodlief On the narrow path out with his children takes a risk with his son and a young aimless girl and others follow.
I am proud of my son and I want to be like him and I am afraid one day he will be like me, all of these thoughts in me at once, and so what I say is that I love him. Do you see, I ask, how people came to help her after they saw you helping her? He smiles. He is learning to think like an adult, but on this day he didn’t know any better than to give a girl with downturned face money and a smile, which is nothing but everything.
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And if you are like me and you look back on the year and think about how once again you have done a poor job of it, of teaching them anything at all that is lasting, take comfort in this: that it is Christmas, that the cycle begins again, that there is still time while they breathe and you breathe. Teach them to watch the star that leads to the baby to the boy to the man to the grave to the life beyond death. Teach them about the joy that has come into a world of downturned, hopeless faces.