Christmas Memories 2015

Each Christmas as the tree, or in our case trees go up, Joyce puts a Nativity set or sets out beneath them. That triggers the way-back time machine for me. I was just a boy the first time I saw the Nativity under my parent's Christmas tree. I loved to play with it, moving the figures around, but there was a fascination with the small shed that held the manger and the Christ child. It was hand made and my mother was protective of it. She told me that when she was a little girl during the great depression my grandpa was out of work. They lived in a small apartment by O'Fallon park in Saint Louis. My grandfather went over to the park and gathered downed branches and sticks and brought them home to make that little shed. He did a wonderful job on it and it was under every Christmas tree up to and through the seventies. Somewhere after that it disappeared. I asked all of my brothers and sisters if they knew what happened to it, but no one seemed to know. Grandpa was a wonderful woodworker. He made little ranch houses from 3/4 inch lumber for all of us to play with. They looked like the things we used to build with Lincoln Logs, only grandpa made them strong enough so they were nearly indestructible. No one seems to know where those all went either. He made little kid-sized chairs, stools and benches for the kids in the family and they too disappeared. All I have left is the memories. I suppose the woodcraft departed with all of the moves in what we now call our mobile society. I have always enjoyed things made of wood and always wished I had grandpa's skills, but I have never even come close.