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Many would argue that the
true Christmas Spirit is with a ???real??? Christmas tree rather
than an artificial one. While our family prefers the
former, our most memorable Christmas Eve involved the
latter.
Having
observed previous Christmas Eve??™s overseas alone, 1962 would
be the first spent with my wife and five sons. We were
stationed, along with 99 other families, at a small Air
Force communications facility 17 miles from the Khyber Pass
at Peshawar, Pakistan, where there is a dearth of flora let
alone Christmas trees.
My family,
having arrived in October at the height of the Cuban missile
crisis, searched far and wide for a real tree, before
turning to a popular mail order house in the United States.
Mail service
to this area, since it is on the opposite side of the earth
from the U.S., was, needless to say, erratic. So much so,
that the facility mailroom had no established schedule for
mail call; instead, a flagpole was located outside the
mailroom door. When mail was in and ready for pickup, the
flag was hoisted, regardless of the time of day.
The family
anxiously awaited the arrival of our tree in the days before
Christmas. We had almost given up hope of receiving it on
time, when on Christmas Eve, word went throughout the
housing area, as we had no telephones, that the ???mail flag
is up.??? At 9:30 p.m., we accepted a battered cardboard box
from the mailroom containing an artificial tree.
As the
family gathered around the tree decorating it ??“ in this
far-off land ??“ it would be a Christmas Eve we would not soon
forget. For the true Christmas Spirit is not found in the
type of tree you put up, rather it is in the family you
share Christmas with.
Joe Sobou |
