This week before Christmas is filled with preparations for the two Christmas Eve Candlelight Services we hold here. One will be a traditional service in our sanctuary, but the other will be held at Lighthouse Beach, at the eastern end of the island. Sand and surf and palm trees will be the order of the night! A far cry from the snow and cold and pine trees of my past!

When I was a boy I never saw the Christmas tree until Christmas morning. My Dad would always get it at the last moment and tuck it away somewhere until after we'd all gone to bed. Then despite having presided at the midnight candlelight service (he was also a pastor) he and my mother would put it up, decorate it, and carefully place the brightly colored packages undernearth its branches. My mother once told me it was how his father had done it, and Dad wanted to pass on to us the excitement he'd felt as a youngster on Christmas morning. And it worked. For the next morning when we all got up, there, as if by magic, was a wondrous sight: lights twinkling, tinsel glittering and gifts for each one of us. I don't know who enjoyed the tradition more: my father or us kids.

One year, though, there was a change. I was in fourth grade, as I remember, and a devoted student of my teacher Miss Barrett. Like most all classrooms in that time, our was decorated for most of December with snowflakes we'd cut out ourselves, chains of red and green construction paper rings, and a tree. Not a plastic tree, mind you, but a real live pine. It stood in the corner of the classroom for two or three weeks before Christmas. Then on the last day of school before our vacation, we had our class Christmas party.

I'm not sure what possessed me to ask, but as we filed out after the last bell, midst shouts of "Merry Christmas!" I asked Miss Barrett what would happen to the tree.

"Oh," she said, "The custodian will put it out in the trash."

Suddenly I had a nine-year-old's flash of inspiration.

"Could I have it?" I asked. Imagine, I thought, how pleased Dad will be to get a free tree. He was a real penny pincher, and in retrospect, that may have been part of his reason for waiting so long each year before buying our tree.

But in the fourth grade I didn't think of that. I just thought about how pleased he'd be at his oldest son's ingenuity.

Having been in a warm classroom for three weeks, it was already pretty bedraggled. In my excitement I didn't even notice the the needles I was leaving behind in the snow as I dragged it home. Dad could have laughed at my Charlie Brown tree, I suppose. Or he could have gotten angry. Or he could have simply said, "No thanks!" But much to his credit, he treated my tree as a real prize, and made me feel like a million bucks!

"That's great John," he said when I showed him the tree. "Good thinking!"

For me it was one of the best Christmases ever--and tyhe memory of it almost fifty years later, still warms my heart!

I'll not be dragging home any trees this year--palm or pine--we've long since resigned ourselves to artificial trees. And I don't need to worry about snow, not here on Sanibel. Parts of Christmas celberations from the past, are now simply part of the past. But the love of that fourth grade Christmas, even though my father is no longer with us, lives on. For the promise of St. Paul is true: "Love never ends."

Might your Christmas, on or off-island, north or south, be truly blessed!