Blessings Unending

By Elsie Gillis

It was 1935. The Depression was still taking its toll. My father had been out of work for many, many months, only picking up odds and ends in jobs from time to time. Mother was holding us together financially by working as a chambermaid at the Newhouse Hotel.

Every morning after breakfast and after family prayer, my mother would leave for work, my sister and I for school and Father would take his prearranged route up one side of State Street, down the other side, up the east side of Main Street and down the west side. Many businessmen whom Daddy had come to know well were on the lookout for jobs he could fill.

On this morning, a few days before Christmas, it seemed to me he pleaded with his God in family prayer with added fervor. He asked him to please bless him this day that something would open up so he might provide a Christmas for his family.

Up and down State Street, up Main Street and the greeting was the same. Nothing! Discouraged, he stopped at Weidner's Shoe Repair Shop. This good man always had some hot Postum "on" for Daddy to help warm him up, as the weather was bitter. He also had a two-day job for my father which, of course, raised my father's spirits.

As they sipped their Postum together in the rear of the shop, Mr. Weidner handed Daddy a package. "A goose for your Christmas dinner," he said. "A lady who owed me some money for shoe repair brought it in this morning. I already have a turkey for our dinner so I thought, 'I will give this to Max.' "

Leaving Weidner's Shoe Repair, all the way down Main Street, he walked with a heart full of gratitude and thanksgiving. For the first time he could hear the sound of Christmas in the air and see the beauty of the Christmas season in the shop windows. He was going to take Elsa a goose she could prepare for their Christmas dinner. In his mind he made plans on how he would present this wonderful bird to her. In his mind he could see the expression on her face, and that warmed him, too.

To warm him further, he took his usual journey through the Broadway entrance of Auerbach's department store and out the State Street entrance, cutting off a half block from the cold. As he was making his way through the holiday crowd, he met a German woman from his hometown in Germany. She had recently been left a widow with two children to raise.

Father greeted her, saying "Frhliches Weinachten" (Merry Christmas), and the woman began to cry.

"It will not be a merry Christmas for us. I have only one loaf of bread in my house. That will be our Christmas dinner."

Father held his goose tightly under his arm because something in him was saying, "Give her the goose." And he was arguing back, "But I asked you for a blessing for my family this morning. This goose is your answer. It would bring such happiness to my Elsa and the girls." And he pressed the goose more tightly to him.

"Give her the goose" rang clearly still, and he gave the woman the goose.

Now his spirits sank to the very depths. How could he go home? How could he tell Elsa that he had had a goose for them — they deserved it so — and he'd given it away? How could he bear to see her tears? He did not want to go home. In utter despair he walked the next three blocks to his home oblivious to the cold, oblivious to everything except his sadness.

Mother met him at the door with a broad smile and a pan holding a dressed chicken. A friend from Logan had dropped by only a few minutes earlier with the chicken.

"The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." At the time he was taking away a goose from Daddy and giving it to this widow whom he'd known in Germany, he was giving us a chicken plus some nuts from a friend.

As though that wasn't miracle enough, my sister, coming home from school that day, was stopped by a man who asked her what she wanted for Christmas. Her answer was: "A pair of anklets and some paper dolls." She wanted the Dionne Quintuplet paper dolls. "Is that all?" the man said to her. "Yes," she said, "because my daddy is out of work." The man handed her a $5 bill.

On Christmas Eve, at 4 p.m. we went to town with our parents. At Kresses' five-and-dime store, they bought my sister and me each a pair of socks and a paper doll cutout book.

I remember that Christmas of 1935 as one of the most joyous I've ever known.