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Health & Fitness

The Ghost of Christmas Past

As best as we can tell, humans seem to be the only earthly creatures that have any significant ability to remember things.  When I say that I am referring to our ability to remember things within a larger context.  We don’t just remember things the way a dog does when he remembers to go get the paper each afternoon.  We also remember dates and times and events, and are able to draw conclusions and even change our behavior based on things that we might remember.  There is no question that our memory is a very significant part of the basic human experience.

Unfortunately, because of the fact that we live in a broken, imperfect, world … sometimes, perhaps even many times for some, our memory of things can be a sad one, rather than a happy one.  And this can even be true when it comes to our memories of past Christmases.  What I’d like to do today is to share some memories of past Christmases of mine which carry with them a little bit of a ghost.  You’ll see as this Rambling progresses that the ghost isn’t always horrible, but it does hover around the memory none-the-less.

The first one goes back to a time long ago when I was a youngster living in Panama back around 1955.  My dad was an Army officer, and he was stationed at one of the U.S. Army bases that were a part of the Canal Zone back then.  A few days before Christmas some friends of mine and I were fooling around … probably playing hide-and-go-seek or something … when we came upon a pile of obvious Christmas presents in my neighbor’s storage shed.  We had a fun time going through the whole pile and congratulating our friend on all the great gifts he and his family were going to get.  But when Christmas morning actually came it turned out that all the presents were for our family instead of his.  I remember my mom being very disappointed when she learned that I knew what each gift was going to be ahead of time.  I also remember severely injuring my little sister’s foot with the bike I got when I took her out for a ride on it.  She didn’t end up being crippled, but I sure felt bad for her the time.

Another one was the first Christmas with my young wife after I got back from Vietnam in 1972.  My wife used to like to put all our presents that we had gotten for each other under the tree several days in advance.  And because they were all there to be fondled and shaken, etc. we both played a game of trying to guess what they were.  Well, she had bought me one that she was absolutely convinced I would never be able to guess.  So on Christmas morning, when I announced before opening it that I thought it was a very nice fancy chess board kit, she was devastated.  To this day, when that time comes up in a Christmas conversation, it is usually not fondly remembered.

No recollection of past Dupere-family Christmases could ever be complete without telling of the time we found the perfect Christmas tree.  For many years when our kids were growing up we used to go out into the woods and look for our Christmas trees in the wild.  One particular year some friends of ours invited us to come out to their place to do our hunting.  They had kids our age, so it became a wonderful two-family affair with hot chocolate and cookies when everything was done.  That year we found a really beautiful tree that was the perfect shape and size and when we got it home and set it up and decorated it, you would have thought that our living room had been prepared by people getting to do a magazine photo shoot.  The downside to that whole experience is that for years afterwards, all the rest of our Christmas trees were all measured against that perfect tree.  None have ever measured up … and none ever will.

The last story involves the Christmas of 1990, when I took my family on vacation and we travelled down from Maine to North Carolina for Christmas.  It was the only Christmas in 18 years of ministry up in Hampden, Maine, that I was ever able to get away at Christmas.  The reason I was able to get permission to be away that Christmas was because my mom and dad were planning a family reunion.  Everyone else in the family, including our children’s great-grandfather were going to be there, so our church board decide to let us be away for Christmas … but just that one time.  Anyway, my fondest memory of that whole time was when we all gathered on my parents’ front porch for the obligatory pictures.  What made it special is that it was the only time that I have a picture of four generations of Dupere sons together.  My grandfather, my father, myself and my son.  I often remember going through my mom and dad’s pictures when I was growing up, and seeing a picture taken at Christmas in Plainfield, CT, probably in 1951.  In the picture were my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my father and me.  The sad thing is that when my mom and dad passed away a few years back, we could not seem to find that picture.  So instead of two pictures with two different sets of four generations of sons, we only have the one from 1990 in North Carolina.

They were all wonderful Christmases, and each one contains wonderful memories … but each one also contains a little bit of a ghost of Christmas past as well.

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