Matthias Bockel, Pixabay

My youngest brother, Michael (age 8 at the time), remembers awakening at 6 a.m., to the sound of a large fan next to his bed. The fan was drying the plaster angels, carefully painted emerald and gold.

I never thought of it as the “best Christmas ever,” but that’s what my younger brother, Pete, told me 50+ years later. The year was 1969.  My father had been fired from his job as president of a wholesale hardware supply company in November. The company wasn’t doing as well as expected.

Two and a half years earlier, the owner had personally recruited my father from a sales engineering manager job in Jacksonville, Fla., where we lived just 25 minutes from the beach, and persuaded him to move an hour inland to the sticks of eastern North Carolina. The seven of us lived in a trailer for four months while our four-bedroom ranch was being built, and a family of copperheads lived below.

I was 14 and these were my “wonder years.” There were woods to explore and we all had friends in the neighborhood. Pete and I were in the Boy Scouts (think F-Troop.)  He was a tenderfoot, and I a First Class. We practiced semaphore atop the ground transformers and finished first at the state Jamboree.

The previous Christmas, I received a new 16-gauge Remington pump under the tree and my brother got my single-shot as a hand me down.  My father’s supply company sold everything from bathtubs to shotguns to every hardware store in Eastern NC, so my new shotgun was purchased wholesale. We hunted dove in the short corn, rabbit and squirrel in the woods, geese around Lake Phelps, and duck at daybreak in the marsh by the paper company.

When my mother heard the news about Dad’s job, I’m sure she was upset but it never showed. We had a family meeting, followed by lots of peanut butter and jelly lunches, and baked beans and hotdog dinners. Rather than buy gifts for one another this Christmas,  it was announced, we were all going to make gifts.

For a short time my father considered the idea of staying in town and opening a sandwich shop where we could all work. My older sister, Alice, was a senior in high school, but I couldn’t quite see myself making pastrami and provolone sandwiches for a summer, let alone the rest of my life.

Instead, my father used the largest flat area in the house, my parents’ king-size bed, to lay out his resumes and three varieties of cover letters in batches for his nationwide job search.  My mother typed 60 wpm, so the 500 letters and envelopes were all typed by hand. Some of us were enlisted to help collate, C-fold letters, stuff them, and seal and stamp the envelopes using a wet sponge.

Alice took the lead in making a gift for my parents from the five of us. We would make five candelabra angels out of chicken wire and papier mâché and cover them with plaster of Paris. Actually, Alice did almost all the work. As for gifts for each other, my younger sister Anne remembers somebody (probably Pete) making a papier mâché cup that was painted and glazed (and probably never used). She doesn’t recall what she did, but she does recall Alice knitted her a scarf about six inches long which came complete with knitting needles so Anne could finish.

As for me, I created an elaborate finger-folding paper ‘fortune tellers’ and filled it with Christmas greetings of “Peace,” “Love” and “Joy” — and a zinger, “Coal in Your Stocking.”

Peter recalls the plaster on the papier mâché angels was not finished that day, but says, “That was the point, wasn’t it?” Even though I had forgotten that detail, the emotion flooded back, and I knew what he meant.

My sister, Anne, reminded me that we did in fact get some small gifts from our parents that year. After we finished opening everything, we were asked to pick one of our gifts, rewrap it, and put it in a bag for a needy family. My sister, Anne, went with my father that afternoon and took the bag to the far side of town. They would have knocked on the door, but Anne recalls the family didn’t have one, only a screen door.

Epilogue:  People remember my parents as “saints.” We moved to New Jersey about six weeks later, leaving my sister behind with a friend’s family to finish her senior year and attend UNC. Nine months after we moved, we learned that the controller for the supply company had been embezzling funds. Still, we were truly blessed in our move, and everything happens for the best for those who believe in Him.