Christmas past

Another Christmas gone by. This one was perhaps not as thrilling as last year, when I had just been back from the desert barely a month, but it was no less enjoyable. This year, we had the practically unprecedented pleasure(say that five times fast!) of my maternal grandparents and my uncle being at my own parents house for Christmas. Traditionally Christmas is spent at their house in Kentucky on the lake. We'd spent some time up there the week before, working on Papaw's deck that he's been building. We got the tin on the roof, and got all the railings finished, even in the rain. Jeff Foxworthy says you might be a redneck if your back porch is bigger than your whole house. Their new deck makes another checkmark on my grandparents extensive list of qualifications for the Redneck Hall of Fame. I'm not saying that to disrespect them at all, I love my grandparents and would put them up against any set out there. I sincerely hope I've got enough gumption left in me when I'm 75 to build a deck on my house big enough for a half-court of basketball.

But I digress. I didn't ask for much this year, as I find that as I get older, the items on my wish list are more and more pricey, and I'd feel bad asking for expensive stuff. I made out really well regardless, got a new Bible, two shirts, a new 155-piece Craftsman tool set, some CDs, and something else that was really cool. My grandfather on my Dad's side was a WWII vet, he was in a tank fighting germans in Europe for THREE SOLID YEARS back in the big war. He never talked about it much, and he died several years ago, when I was about nine. Well, one of his second cousins interviewed him for a college project in 1989, and that cousin just recently found the tapes of those interviews and gave them to my Dad. Daddy took the tapes and had them copied onto CDs, and gave a copy of them to me and each of my siblings, and all the rest of the extended family when we were up in Kentucky. I'm looking forward to hearing them, and I think I'll come to appreciate them more and more as the years go by. My youngest brother wasn't even born when Grandaddy died, so listening to those recordings will be the first time he's ever heard his voice.

Today me and my next oldest brother helped Daddy wire some fluorescent lights and some outlets in his building. We got the downstairs done, and I think I'm going to help Daddy work on the upstairs some tomorrow before I have to go to a funeral in the afternoon. I've been working on the Military Honors program with the National Guard for the last few weeks. It's interesting work, sometimes. We mostly perform military honors for deceased veterans from all different branches of service, including flag-folding, playing taps, and a rifle salute. There's a national cemetery in town close by the armory, and that's where we do most of the services. We do go out into the surrounding counties sometimes though, finding ourselves in little bitty family cemeteries waaaaay out in the sticks on occasion. The one tomorrow may be one of those, right now I only know it's in another county. The families really seem to appreciate what we do. One of the few things I remember about Grandaddy's funeral is the rifle salute and someone in uniform presenting my grandmother a folded flag. Granny has the flag in a case on the wall with a picture of him, and his rank(corporal) and ribbons, probably from his original uniform from 1945. My grandfather was a humble man, who got out of the army after he got home from the war, and became the head of maintenence at Western Kentucky University in later years. He never got past the third grade, but him and millions like him changed the world, and sacificed more than me and my generation could comprehend.

I'm not really writing this for any specific purpose, am just rambling about life in general. I'm often struck by how exquisitely blessed I am to have the quality of family and friends that I do. I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas, and am looking forward to the New Year with great anticipation. Like a little boy in a book I read once said, "God bless us, everyone!"