As the Christmas shopping season has started for me in my 67th year on this earth I look back at how the Christmas season has changed. As a little boy growing up in the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania, Christmas was the greatest time of the year. We always went out to a tree farm and cut
down our own Christmas tree and the tree was always put up and decorated on Christmas Eve day.
It was a tradition. It was a peaceful time in the Poconos and now I live in North Carolina. We will be getting our tree in a couple of weeks. Not going to a tree farm, but buying it at a store. Quite a change and as I look through the rows of trees, I can't help but thinking back to when we walked through the snow for the longest time looking for that perfect tree. My first memory of getting a Christmas tree in the Poconos was in the early
1950s, we paid $2. Now we have to pay between $25 and $30 and we don't get the pleasure of cutting down our own.
Our shopping was done in the 1950s looking through the Sears & Roebuck catalog or the Montgomery Ward catalog. Our other shopping was done in the town of Stroudsburg, PA. It was so enjoyable looking in Newberry's, Wycoffs's and other stores along main street. Everyone was so polite and considerate. We would always go to the lunch counter in the J.J. Newberry store and have something to eat. We didn't have fast food joints back in those days. Now my mind is back in 2015 and I think of the shopping. People no longer look at Christmas as a Christian holiday. It is now so commercialized that it makes me sick thinking of it. The day after Thanksgiving is Black Friday. People camp out in front of stores so they can get inside first to get a bargain, people fight to get something, they will push and shove. I do not shop on Black Friday, because to me it is insanity the way people act. The people that act with rudeness when shopping on Black Friday, they should take a step back and remember what the true meaning of Christmas is. It is nice to get presents, but the holiday is to remember, Jesus. I am ashamed of the way people act. I do some shopping in stores yet, but mornings during the week when most people are at work. I also do quite a bit of shopping online. It is easier to do it from the comfort of your home.
I remember one year in the Poconos we had a heavy snow right before Christmas and we couldn't get out to buy a tree. My brother went out into the forest and cut down a nice looking white pine. It was a lot different than any tree we had. The needles on a white pine are very long. On Christmas Eve we put up the tree and decorated it and I can remember to this day how beautiful it was. That was a long long time ago, but I can remember it like it was yesterday. Snowed in on Christmas, opening presents, and enjoying a fine Christmas dinner with the family. Family is a time of the year when the entire family is in each others heart.
Christmas has changed a lot through all of the years I have lived. I can think of when the kids were little and when they opened their presents. The joy they had, as well as Lina and myself. I still love Christmas and I always will. I now have family around the globe. My daughter and youngest granddaughter live about 4 miles away. We will spend Christmas with them. My mother and father are both deceased, but I think of them often at Christmas time. My brother has moved from the Poconos and now lives in Florida. My oldest granddaughter lives in Oregon. My son, his wife, and three grandsons live in Okinawa. However we will talk on the phone on Christmas and my wife and I think of someday when they will move back to the states and we will have Christmas dinner together again. The newest additions to the family are my grandson Jeremy's wife Kate and their daughter, our great granddaughter, Erica. Erica will be having her first Christmas, I smile as I think of her, wishing I could hold her, but impossible as she is in Okinawa, Japan.
A class reunion is being planned for next year, the 50th year since graduating from high school. I have talked with many of my classmates lately as I have been searching for them. I will be thinking of them on Christmas, my personal friends and neighbors, my many facebook friends, and I wish everyone a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I will not say Happy Holidays, I grew up saying Merry Christmas and I will always say it. If anyone is offended my me saying, Merry Christmas, I say I could not care less.
Copyright Larry W. Fish 2015
