Real Christmas

Action hero Mr. T once dressed up as Santa for a meeting with late former U.S.
President Ronald Reagan.

The A-Team star - real name Laurence Tureaud - was invited to meet the late leader and his First Lady Nancy Reagan at Christmas in 1983.

And, despite pleas from his mother to behave himself, the actor was determined to make his presidential visit as memorable as possible.

He tells British film magazine Empire, “When I was invited to the White House by Nancy Reagan in Christmas 1983, my mama told me, ‘Be good, son. You be on your best behaviour.’ “And I said, ‘Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am.’ I dressed up like Santa Claus and walked around with the President. That was an experience I will never forget.”

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Two months after March 7, 1945, when American, British and other Allied forces had crossed the Rhine River into Germany, World War II in Europe came to an end. On May 7, 1945, Germany signed an unconditional surrender, which was ratified the next day. May 8, 2008, marks the 63rd anniversary of that victory. Clifford Hughes of Shelby, North Carolina took part in many of the bloody battles beforehand.

“I am an 88-year-old native of Shelby and have lived here all my life. I was drafted into the Army during World War II, where I served for 43 months in the Sixth Armored Division. “At the insistence of my two grown sons, I have recently begun to write about some of my life experiences… I was in combat for nine months in France and Germany, was in five major battles for which I was given five gold stars and was awarded the Bronze Star medal.

“I was not an officer, just an enlisted man doing his patriotic duty for the country I love.” Here is Hughes’ account of a horrific Christmas Eve, 1944, on the way to Germany.

Our Sixth Armored Division, of which I was a part, had been temporarily settled down near the small town of Metz, France. Having already been in combat for more than five months, and in three major battles and many skirmishes with the Germans all across France, we were enjoying this brief rest.

Three of us who stayed quite close together in combat had found a barn nearby our headquarters, which gave us some protection from the cold, unpredictable weather. Some wheat straw in the barn made our bedrolls more comfortable than sleeping on the floor. We had found a small tree, which we decorated with torn pieces of red paper from one of our Christmas packages from home.

It was late afternoon, Dec. 23, 1944, when we got word to be ready to move out early the next morning, Christmas Eve. The Fourth Armored Division, which had been fighting the Germans near Bastogne, Belgium, had its supply line cut off and that they were about to run out of food and ammunition.

Our order from Gen. George S. Patton, Commander of the Third Army - of which our Sixth Armored Division was a part - was for us to make a breakthrough and relieve the Fourth Armored Division, A.S.A.P.

Among all our gear, our food, our ammunition, our bedrolls, I placed the little Christmas tree in the half-track (armored truck) assigned to my section. We were desperately trying to enjoy the Christmas season as best we could.

We traveled north toward Bastogne that day. About half way to our destination, we stopped over for the night in another small town. As luck would have it, my two buddies and I found an empty two-story building close by. It had a large upstairs room with several bunks with mattresses on them, no less. We quickly claimed them for our use for Christmas Eve night.

Then we set up our little Christmas tree in this room. We three had decided some days before to wait until Christmas morning and open our gifts from home together to make it seem more like Christmas. The next morning we sat on our bunks and sang Christmas carols as we opened our gifts.

Soon after breakfast, we continued on our way to Bastogne. We knew the fighting had been fierce and the losses great, but we bravely went on, although quite anxious and concerned about what may lie ahead.

Reaching Bastogne a few hours later, we set up our combat command headquarters on the first floor of a building that had a ground-level basement room in the back. This room had only one window. There was about eight inches of snow on the ground, with the temperature hovering at zero degrees. We were issued bed sheets to use to camouflage our vehicles.

With this done and our guards assigned, another buddy and I decided to take some pictures.
Across the street was a two-story stone building, which appeared to have been a hospital. The building made a good background for the few snapshots that we took. This buddy was Gilbert White, whose home was in Troy, N.Y.

“Gil,” as we called him, was a likeable young man, some two or three years younger than I. He had gotten married while on furlough just before we left the States. His wife became pregnant at that time and bore them a son. He showed me pictures of their new baby boy that day at Bastogne, and of course he was so proud of him! The baby was about two months old at that time.

After taking a few snapshots, we returned to our headquarters and began preparing the basement room where we were to sleep. We found some logs in the woods nearby and stacked them across the open window to give us some protection in case of enemy fire.

We carefully covered the window from the inside with a blanket to provide complete blackout for our room, as we prepared to bed down after a harrowing and tiresome day.

Our headquarters company had a small electric generator to which we connected a line to provide a dim light so we could see to roll out our bedrolls. About six of us were planning to sleep in this small basement room, which was only about 8×20 feet in size.

It was almost midnight. Two or three men were already in their bedrolls to my left, toward the window. I was on my knees rolling out my bedroll. Gil was hard by my right, still standing, when an enemy shell exploded just outside that window to our room! It knocked down most of the logs we had stacked over the window, shrapnel came through the window, knocking out our electric power and ripping down pieces of ceiling plaster.

“I’ve been hit! I’ve been hit!” Gil began screaming.

He had indeed been hit by a piece of shrapnel, which had obviously passed over me as I was on my knees, and had hit him as he stood about 12 inches to my right! Had I been still standing, this shrapnel would have hit me instead of Gil. My being on my knees had indeed saved my life!

We called emergency and Gil was rushed to the field hospital. We found out a few days later that the shrapnel had hit him in the left shoulder, severely damaged his spine and lodged in this right shoulder. He died a few days later.

Yes, it was a terrible Christmas and a sad Christmas, but we were so thankful that there were no other casualties in our company that evening in Bastogne. That was a part of what came to be called the “Battle of the Bulge.”

This article appears courtesy of The Star, of Cleavland County, North Carolina

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~ Winter was a time of celebration to pre-Christian Romans and they decorated fir trees in honor of this seasonal change.

~ The use of a Christmas wreath as a decoration on your front door, mantel or bay window symbolizes a sign of welcome and long life to all who enter.

~Today poinsettias are the most popular Christmas plant and are the number one flowering potted plant in the United States.

~ Real Christmas trees are an all-American product, grown in all 50 states, including Alaska and Hawaii.

Most artificial trees are manufactured in Korea, Taiwan, or Hong Kong.

~ For every real Christmas tree harvested, 2 to 3 seedlings are planted in its place.

~ In 1836, Alabama is the first state in the USA to declare Christmas a legal holiday.

~ The biggest selling Christmas single of all time is Bing Crosby’s White Christmas.

~ Due to the time zones, Santa has 31 hours to deliver gifts? This means that he would have to visit 832 homes each second!

~ In 1937, the first postage stamp to commemorate Christmas was issued in Austria.

~ For every real Christmas tree harvested, 2 to 3 seedlings are planted in its place. Each hectare provides the daily oxygen requirements of 45 people.

~ Epiphany, 6th January, is the traditional end of the Christmas holiday and is the date on which we take down the tree and decorations. To do so earlier is thought to bring bad luck for the rest of the year. From the middle ages until the mid-nineteenth century, Twelfth Night was more popular than Christmas day, and even today some countries celebrate Epiphany as the most important day of the Christmas season.

~ Three years after Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb in 1879, Edward H. Johnson, who worked for Edison’s company, had Christmas tree bulbs especially made for him. He proudly displayed his electric tree lights at his home on Fifth Avenue, New York City. They caused a sensation although some years were to pass before mass-manufactured Christmas tree lights were widely available.

~ In America in 1822, the postmaster of Washington, DC, complained that he had to add 16 mailmen at Christmas to deal with cards alone. He wanted the number of cards a person could send limited by law. “I don’t know what we’ll do if this keeps on,” he wrote.

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Things were sad at our house when our nineteen-year-old sister died in June of 1940. Her name was Alice. She contacted polio when she was a three-year-old.

Alice wore braces until she was in her teens. I spent more than one morning trying to repair the leather and iron contraptions so she could get to school.

Numerous surgical procedures by doctors at the Primary Children’s Hospital and at the Shiners Hospital in Salt Lake City eventually got her to the point where she could walk. A special shoe was made to compensate for the difference in the length of her legs.

Alice had that characteristic in common with my Welch grandfather whose leg was crushed while quarrying granite for the Salt Lake Temple. Two years were required for his recovery; but he did meet my grandmother. If that were not so, I wouldn’t be writing this story, would I?

After high school, Alice declined; finally spending all of her time in bed. She got out of bed only once during this period. That was to play the piano for the last time. She had been giving me lessons. That was the end of my musical career too.

I always talked to her after school about school and what was going on in the world. When she died, I didn’t care about school anymore.

Doctors came and went.

One day a young doctor came that looked smart and efficient. Our hopes increased for a day or too. Unfortunately, he could do nothing. Alice steadily declined to the day of her death.

I remember how sad that day was.

My curly-haired younger brother, Don, and I were building a fort on the kitchen floor when she died. We built our forts from kindling wood. The floor had new linoleum, a sign that we were coming out of the depression.

Dad was back at work and things were getting better, except for Alice. Finally, that evening, Dad told us she had died and took us in to see her.

He had placed quarters over her eyes held there by a cloth. He had tied her mouth shut with another cloth.

It was depressing.

When the morticians came, and in an apparent rough manner, rolled my sister from her bed sheets into theirs, my mother gave out a cry that sends shivers up my spine to this day.

The funeral was torture to me. My mother was crying and I was sad.

At Christmas time, Dad asked it we wanted a Christmas tree. I was eight years old and my brother was five. We knew that he didn’t feel like Christmas and neither did we.

I told Dad that we were old enough to not have a tree.

It was our custom to put the tree up early. As the days passed to Christmas Eve, my brother and I became sadder by the minute.

A Christmas without a Christmas tree was not Christmas.

We had some sparse Christmases during the depression. I remember one or two Christmases that were saved by the members of our Church who brought food and gifts on Christmas Eve.

One person who saw that was done was Jesse Evans. Jesse was an operatic singer and was then singing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. (She later married a gentleman that became the president of the Mormon Church and her name was changed to Jesse Evans Smith.)

During the depression, Dad got a job as an accountant with the WPA. The WPA hired people of many professions to give them work when there was no work.

Dad was auditing a bank in Logan Utah when he read in the paper that he had been appointed to the position of Deputy City Clerk. Jesse Evans had been elected to the office of City Clerk and hired dad. (He was never out of work after that, serving as a county commissioner and then serving for many years as the Auditor of Salt Lake City.)

But this Christmas was going to be dismal. We could have used Jesse with her loud voice and good cheer.

I felt sorry for my little brother, Don. He didn’t seem to know what was going on.

Christmas Eve was Doldrumsville.

I remember looking out the window. Snow had just started to fall. That’s when a dump truck pulled up in front of our house. It was full of Christmas trees. A man headed for our porch. I answered the door and the man stood there with a Christmas tree. He said that he would sell us one for fifty cents, saving us half the regular price. He had too many trees and too little time to sell them.

I thought just maybe.

I looked up at Dad. So did my little brother, Don. Dad dug into his purse and paid the man and told him Merry Christmas. The man repeated the words and was off to another house. (I learned later that we were not the only family in the neighborhood to buy a tree from that man at the last minute.)

Elated, I worked on the wooden stand for the tree. Somehow I always got that job. I had to do it myself with no help from anyone else.

Quicker-than-usual, we had the tree standing next to the wall in the parlor.

Out came the decorations.

We went to work.

Christmas returned to Dad. He got his excitement back and helped us to decorate the tree.

We were in full swing when my older sisters, and finally my older brother, came drifting home.

Each one had a snow-covered Christmas tree.

Everyone broke out laughing. That was the first time that had happened since Alice died.

Two or three of these unneeded trees were purchased at the local grocery and we were able to return them. This was quickly done.

Soon we were all decorating, not only the tree, but the whole house. Then our siblings put gifts under the tree.

There would be Christmas and it was here.

I’ve thought on that Christmas over the years.

It is exactly as Alice would have wanted it.

Would I be surprised if she actually planned it?

Not one minute! She is eternal.

Okay, so I’m crying.

John T. Jones, Ph.D. (tjbooks@hotmail.com, a retired VP of R&D for Lenox China, is author of detective & western novels, nonfiction (business, scientific, engineering, humor), poetry, etc. Former editor of Ceramic Industry Magazine, Jones is Executive Representative of International Wealth Success. He calls himself “Taylor Jones, the hack writer.”

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Early last week, James Carroll of Tyler, Texas, came to Billings for the second time in his life.

It was an enjoyable visit, but it was hard to top that first one, on Christmas Eve 1954.

Carroll was a 23-year-old Army private at the time, just out of basic training at Fort Bliss, Texas, on his way to Seattle on a troop train. From Seattle he shipped out to Alaska, where he would serve for the duration of his two-year enlistment.

The train stopped in Colorado to pick up some more troops, bringing the number of soldiers to somewhere between 100 and 200 men. As far as Carroll remembers, they were never allowed off the train until they reached Billings.
It was 5 or 6 p.m., “about time for the evening meal.” Carroll and four other guys walked downtown for something to eat. He doesn’t recall the name of the restaurant, but it was a good meal, with big steaks around the horn.

“We selected what we thought was the best place to eat,” he said. “What the heck, it was Christmas Eve, so we were going to have the best we could find.”

On the house

When they finished eating and walked up to pay their tab, the man behind the counter wouldn’t take their money. “He said our money was no good,” Carroll said. “We couldn’t believe it, because it was an expensive meal.”

They left there in high spirits and continued strolling around downtown, struck by how friendly everybody was, how welcome they were made to feel.

“The shocker was when I got back to the train. Nobody had been able to pay for anything in Billings,” not even those who had tried to purchase gifts for their wives or girlfriends.

“I’m sure it was just spontaneous on the part of the people there,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. A soldier was not going to pay for anything in Billings on Christmas Eve.”

He laughed and added, “I should have bought a car.”

As Carroll was preparing for bed that night, with the train just leaving town, he pulled aside the little curtains on his Pullman car.

The kid from Texas hadn’t seen much snow in his life, and he’d rarely seen anything so lovely.

The half-forgotten words of an old poem came to him that night in the Pullman car, something about the moonlight glimmering on the white-crusted snow, and he heard the soothing chug-chug of the train picking up steam.

“I’ve remembered that picture all my life,” he said.

And for 53 years he’s been telling people about the town that wouldn’t take money from soldiers on Christmas Eve.

He’d never been back until last week, when he and a companion, Alta Leath, were visiting friends in Cody. When Carroll saw how close it was to Billings, they decided to drive up.

“I’m 75 years old, and I don’t know how many more chances I’ll get,” he said.

So he and Alta spent the afternoon in Billings, driving around, shopping, taking photographs, visiting the newspaper to share Carroll’s story. Mostly, he came back to deliver a message.

“You just be sure to tell the people of Billings, thank you, from me and a couple hundred soldiers on Christmas Eve 1954.”

From the Billings Gazette, written by Ed Kemmick

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CLEVELAND — A drive through a renewed Cleveland neighborhood on a warm summer day shouldn’t evoke too many holiday memories.

But a bunch of tourists toting cameras and buying T-shirts might beg to differ. They are among the minions who have flocked to the tall yellow house in the working-class area that served as the backdrop for the movie “A Christmas Story.”Despite the warm conditions, the neighborhood still has the same feel of the movie.

More than 33,000 visitors have visited since the Christmas Story house and a museum across the street opened in November. People wait in line for tickets, posing with a Red Ryder BB gun in front of the leg lamp in the picture window of the house in the Tremont neighborhood just south of downtown Cleveland

The only thing missing was Ralphie Parker running through his backyard, trying to escape the clutches of that ornery yellow-eyed bully Scut Farkus.

The house was chosen as the backdrop for the 1983 movie because its exterior brought back memories of the 1940s Hammond, Ind., neighborhood that the book’s author, Jean Shepherd, grew up in. And true to form, developers have even doused the backyard with a blanket of cotton, making it look like it has a thin coating of snow.

“You see people so happy to see this area because they love the movie so much,” said Steve Siedlecki, the director of the Christmas Story museum. “It spans all generations.”

Developers expected crowds to peak during the winter.

They have been surprised how people have kept flocking to the facility throughout the spring and summer, buying decoder rings and Lifebuoy soap as they leave.

“I think the movie resonates with people,” said Darryl Haase, the curator of the museum. “It was the first Christmas movie where some of the characters were kind of quirky. There’s an edge to it that all people can relate to.”

The movie has become a holiday classic over the years, shown on a loop for 24 hours by a cable network. That extensive play has made watching the movie a holiday tradition in many homes.

“I just think this is wonderful,” Parma, Ohio, native Joyce McLaughlin said.

Provided by San Antonio Express News

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Wow… it’s 90 outside and all I can think of is “I’d give anything for some snow”. How I miss the coldness of winter, and the warmth of Christmas. Lately I’ve spent a lot of time remembering what Christmas was like a child.  As other memories of my childhood fade those joyous Christmas times seem like yesterday. For some reason my memory is not that one of a normal individual, I remember actually sleeping in my crib, the blue vinyl car seat I would ride in and a few other scattered mements of when I was a very small child. The one memory that I treasure most, you ask?

First, let me point out that back then there wasn’t all this worrying about being politically correct crap, and people went all out for Christmas. Everywhere you looked you could SEE Christmas. From the local grocery store to that house way out in the country, to the downtown businesses, even the city street lamps were decorated with tons of lights, in the shapes of little Christmas trees, and such. It was like a multi-colored sort of heaven for me. There was one thing in particular that was outstanding back then… the Biltmore Dairy bar’s HUGE evergreen tree that stood at the edge of their parking lot. I can only imagine how they managed to decorate the enormous tree, but every year with out a doubt, it got covered with those huge multi-colored lights… and to top it off a giant lit yellow star.

The year was 1976, and I was only 3. Now of course I can’t remember what month it was, but I do know it was either late November, or December. My aunt Alice had picked me up from my Granny’s house and I was going to spend the weekend with her. On our way back to her house she decided to stop and give me an up-close look-see at my favorite tree. As a matter of fact she pulled into the parking spot right under it. I will never forget it. She got me out of that blue car seat and stood me on the hood of her ‘67 Ford Galaxie. It was dusk and snow flurries fell all around us. I stood in awe looking up this giant tree. It seemed to touch the sky, and I was tickled to be there. Now don’t forget, I was only 3 (3 and a half to be exact) and curiosity set in. In the blink of an eye I reached out and grabbed the nearest bulb… and it burned! I let go as quick as I grabbed it, and aunt Alice looked to make sure I was ok. Amazingly even after being burned I didn’t want to leave.

Later in life when reminiscing with Alice about the incident, she pointed out that I didn’t cry from the burn, instead, I cried when she got me off the hood and put me back in the car to leave. I don’t recall that part… but I will NEVER forget how Christmas was burned into my memory!

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