Asked to write about our best Christmas gift, a short wave of self pity washed over me, as my younger brother and I never received Christmas gifts and we certainly were made fully aware of the fallacy of a proposed “Santa Claus”. In fact the first Christmas tree we ever got was off a lot, late one Christmas Eve when they marked the remaining trees way down to get rid of them.

Daddy was a widower, left with 2 little children ages two and five. A cement finisher by trade, he was a rough, burly man who after a hard days work on his knee, trawling concrete, picked us up from a sitter, bather, fed and clothed us. He curled my straight stringy hair with a curling iron heated on the gas stove every morning so I’d be “pretty”. In those first months after mom died, we would go to bed with him one each cuddled along side of him. He would listen to the news on the radio with a string tied to the bedpost and the radio plug that he could pull with his toes to turn the radio off so he wouldn’t disturb us after we went to sleep.

He was a good dad, a caring gift from God, who loved us and taught us that gifts were not important. What is important is love and caring for one another. He was the best gift ever.