Some Christmas memories burn brighter than others

Editor's note: This is a reprinted column from January, 2004.

It's amazing how quickly Christmas cheer turns to melancholy immediately following the holidays. The Christmas decorations, which seemed so beautiful a few days ago, now seem garish and out of place. For most of us, it's like those decorations can't come down fast enough. These days I can't even stand more than a couple of days after Christmas before the tinsel, garland and wreathes are boxed up for the next year. Eleven years ago, though, I didn't want it to end.

The Vietnam War had sent members of my family all over the globe. Not since 1969 had all of us four boys been home with Mom and Dad for Christmas - or anything else, for that matter. Several decades later we still couldn't seem to pull it together. We could get three brothers home, but getting that elusive last brother - and it rotated between us as to which one couldn't make it - seemed impossible.

One was in Los Angeles, one in Wyoming, another in Colorado Springs or Germany or Korea or Kansas or wherever. We just couldn't pull it off. That changed in 1992.

I'll confess right up front that I possess no special perceptual powers, but something was different that year. It wasn't a foreboding feeling, just a feeling I can't describe. I called my brothers at least six months ahead - maybe more - and told them to forget whatever they had planned for Christmas and to make a point to come home for the holidays. We had to do it then, I explained, or we might never do it.

Beginning about Dec. 22, 1992, we began arriving; some on the same day, others the next. By Christmas Eve, all of us were home. I've never spent a week laughing so hard in my life. We told stories my parents never heard - nor probably wanted to hear - about things we had done as kids that only the four of us boys knew about.

What would have brought sure punishment as children from my strict dad, instead left him chuckling out loud. You couldn't have slapped the smile off of his face that week. All of his boys were home - finally. We even posed for our first-ever family portrait.

None of us wanted that week to end, but of course it did. We left the same way we came, a few one day and another the next. It hurt but the warm memories of that Christmas have trumped all others - even the one when I received the bicycle I wanted so badly.

Ten months after that wonderful holiday, with promises to do it again from all of my brothers, my father died in his sleep. So it can't happen again, and for that I'm sorry. A couple of years ago I lost my oldest brother to cancer. Through the sorrow of these losses, I've clung to that memory of the Christmas of 1992. It still warms my soul.

So if I have a message to anyone, it would be to start immediately getting your entire family together for next Christmas. Don't wait, don't make excuses, put aside petty differences that might be keeping you apart, and just do it no matter what. Your work can wait and nothing you will be doing next Christmas is more important. Believe me on this one.

While the Christmas ornamentation came down early in my house this year, the glow of that Christmas 11 years ago still is as enchanting as anything I remember as a child. There's nothing garish or out of place about those memories. And they won't be boxed up and put away for another year. I'll keep them right here with me.