The Sentinel, Christmas Memories #3

      

      One year in Escondido, California our daughter Annie wanted a set of weights to build her strength. We went to a Sears store and bought one for her. A nice young employee asked if we needed help taking it out of the store. He lifted it like it was a box of tissue paper and carried it to the parking lot and then deposited it into our car trunk. So far so good. We got home and on Christmas eve we went out to the car to retrieve the weight set. I have no idea how much the set weighed, but lifting it out of the trunk was dreadful. Joyce and I struggled to pull the set out and then get it into the house. We tried to be quiet, but the huge box full of weights and bars and a bench had no padding so iron was clanking against iron. We got it into our closet and went to bed. The next morning on Christmas we struggled to remove it and place it by the tree thinking it would be a wonderful surprise for her. Annie admitted later that morning that she knew it was there because she heard all the clanking as we brought it into the house. It’s funny to me now, but not so funny back then.
      One Christmas in California I was working in the product engineering lab with the engineers and technicians. As you may imagine it was a rather spartan environment. I saw a small Christmas tree (18 inches high?) I bought it and took it to the lab to brighten the season. The tree just had a few ornaments and no lights. The crew decided it needed some lights, so they and the head engineer (being the technical people they were) thought a simple string of lights was not suitable, so they began scrounging some wiring and some of the earliest LED diodes (lights) and then started wiring them together to light the tree. Because LEDs work on a low voltage they could not be plugged into a regular electric socket, so they ended up using a precision calibrated power supply for this little tree. That power supply probably cost well over a thousand dollars and was one we used in the lab, all that for a $5 Christmas tree. It was beautiful and brightened the season.
      This last story for today actually happened in the middle summer. Our daughter Annie and grandchild Hailey were in a Lowes hardware store getting something for Annie's husband Rett. Hailey was still a very young child. They picked out what was needed and went to the checkout counter. There was a short-stocky man ahead of them. He had the perfect white hair and the beard. Hailey asked Annie, “is that Santa here in the hot weather?” Annie replied, “Santa deserves his vacation in the summer.” The man overheard the conversation and as he started to walk away from the counter, he turned, put his finger to the side of his nose (as Santas do) and said to Hailey, “I’ll be seeing you at Christmas.”