Seventy-three years ago, we were living in a little rented house just south of Logan, Utah. I was 7 years old and I had a brother who was 9. We didn’t have much expectation for the upcoming Christmas because Santa Claus had been unable to find our house the year before. And then the big kids in the neighborhood told us who Santa Claus really was.
The year 1940 had been a disaster in our world. Dad hadn’t been able to make the payment on our small farm, so we lost that and the little house my dad had built on it. We were jobless, car-less, and next to homeless. The chances that Santa Claus might find our house seemed even bleaker than the year before, but as Christmas approached, my Mom decided we would not have another Christmas without toys. She made some good homemade candy — two kinds of fudge, pinoche and divinity — and put it into little cellophane bags. While we were in school, she walked into Logan and went door to door to sell her candy. Cache Valley is cold in the winter, and I can imagine that Mom didn’t have a good coat, or boots or gloves. I remember she would come home about frozen stiff.
After supper was over, Mom would fire up the wood stove and make more candy. The next day she’d walk to another area of Logan and again go door to door. World War II had just begun. People were broke and many were scared. It wasn’t easy to sell candy door-to-door.
That Christmas, I got a wind-up motorcycle cop that would run around and around in circles while the siren wailed. It was a wonderful Christmas.
I will always honor my mother for what she did that Christmas. She was only 28 years old and already she’d had four children born alive, though two had died. She’d also had two miscarriages with heavy hemorrhaging. She had lost all her upper teeth and spent two years in poverty so crushing I can’t even imagine the depth of her despair. Grandma used to send us a 3-cent stamp in her letters so that Mom could send an answer. It would have been easy to give up, but Mom didn’t. She made candy and sold it on the frozen streets of Logan, so her 7-year-old could have a toy for Christmas. I still have that little wind-up motorcycle, and it still works.
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