A Simple Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page B

tree, and maybe if I ask for something, I’ll actually let one of my kids buy it for me. (Though considering I’m pretty set in my ways, that’s pretty unlikely.) But footballs and chemistry sets aside, I still don’t believe that we need to wait for some “special day” to find the real meaning of Christmas.
    Yes, I’ve come to terms with my “sins” of unwrapping gifts before Christmas as a child and scheming to open them early even as an adult. And I’ve also come to realize that anticipation helps you appreciate things more. I could eat a green tomato and be fine, but allowing it to ripen to a bright red will give it the full flavor God intended it to have. I have learned that a carefully aged steak will have a full-bodied flavor that far surpasses that of cheaper cuts of meat. And I also know that the lifetime I spend on this broken earth filled with all of its shortcomings and problems and pressures will help me appreciate Heaven that much more when I finally get there.
    There are some things in life that are best when experienced in their proper season and at the appropriate moment. It was a hard lesson for me to accept when I was a kid who just couldn’t wait to get my new football, but I get it now. So what if it took me fifty years to figure it out?
    I’ve also learned that even though presents are great, the greatest gift of all is the one God gave us that very first Christmas. He gave us the gift of life and of His love. Luckily, that’s not something we have to wait for anymore!

2.
    Sacrifice
    On February 9, 1964, I was one of seventy-three million Americans watching The Ed Sullivan Show when the Beatles made their first appearance in the United States. My family usually watched Ed Sullivan anyway, but that night was something special.
    Like many kids who saw this quartet of long-haired Brits with electric guitars and drums, I realized their music was something very different, and I immediately knew that I wanted a guitar so I could become one of the Beatles. So what if I was only eight years old at the time and had never played a guitar in my life? I wasn’t concerned with minor details like that, and playing a guitarrealloud and having girls scream for me seemed like a great goal in life. I was hooked.
    The kids in my neighborhood were just as stricken as I was, and we started gathering Coke bottles that we found discarded on the side of the road and turning them in for their two-cent deposit value. Eventually we earned enough to buy the 45 rpm record of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” with “I Saw Her Standing There” on the B side of the record. It was the first record I ever bought. Before that, I only had little 78 rpm recordings of children’s stories with songs, like “The Poky Little Puppy” and “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” Coke bottles (in the South, we call all soda Coke even if it’s actually a different brand) were the great equalizer of economic disparity among kids where I came from. Some kids automatically got money from their parents as an allowance, which seemed pretty terrific, but the rest of us could take our little red wagons (everyone had one) and pull them around town and pick up enough empty bottles to get some easy money, even if it did require some serious scavenging around tall weeds and ditches.
    The little record player I had was better suited for “Poky Little Puppy” records, but it would play a 45, although I had to turn the volume all the way up to get anywhere near the “rock and roll” level I wanted. The little two-inch speaker distorted horribly when pushed up to ten on the dial, but I didn’t care. The louder the better. Unfortunately, the louder-the-better mind-set stayed with me after I advanced to larger speakers backed up by an amplifier that emitted 120 decibels—enough to take paint off the wall! Yes, I know that I shouldn’t have played