Christmas Eve

INTRODUCTION There's nothing like a country Christmas. Now that I am a great-grandmother, I have time on my hands to reminiscence about my childhood. Often after the world has gone to bed, I have stayed up and remembered a childhood event. I started writing my holiday memories down a couple of years ago. One of my earliest memories was when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. It was my parents wedding anniversary. They celebrated by taking my sister and me shoe shopping, We each got a pair of cowboy boots. Hers were white and mine were black and white. We got to wear them home. I was so proud when I marched out of that store wearing my new boots. I thought everyone on the street admired them. When we got in the car, Daddy turned the car radio on to a news station. Both of my parents got real quiet and told us not to make a sound, because the President was talking. He said, "This is a date which will live in infamy, because on this date, Japanese planes attacked the United States Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Territory." “That means we are also at war with Japan.” Daddy had a somber look on his face. “Isn't it enough that Germany is trying to drag us into their war,” (World War II lasted from 1939 ti 2945.) Those were my preschool years. Although I did not go to school. I only went to kindergarten for one day. I got in trouble that day for telling all the family secrets. It wasn't that bad. I just told the teacher that my birth father died, and my aunt had epilepsy. My parents just did not want those facts out in the open. Back to thee bombing of Pearl Harbor, there was complete silence in the car going home. Except the radio was still on. I did not understand what was going on, because I was only four-years-old. The attack took my parents by complete surprise. That was true of everyone they knew. No one cared that I had new boots. The military operation destroyed the American battleship, the USS Arizona, and it killed more than 2300 Americans. All that I knew at the time was airplanes from Japan caused the damage that everyone was sad about. We were living in Arizona at the time, but then we moved to a farm in Colorado. Every time a plane flew over our farm to crop dust our fields after that, I thought they had come to bomb our farm house, We did not live on that farm very long. Farming was not Daddy's area of expertise. We eventually moved to where he could find employment. My daddy always worked, but he had a hard time finding a skill that he liked. Being a carpenter was his favorite occupation. It wasn't until he became a carpenter foreman that he really enjoyed being on the job. First he helped build bridges for new highways in the western states. For several years he worked for a company that built homes on military bases. Those were the places that I lived. That is why these stories are scattered from Washington to Texas. Being born in 1937, I lived through some unusual hard times. My earliest memory was living in a small camping trailer, where I slept on the table that folded into a bed. That was where we lived when my sister fell out of a moving car and my aunt grabbed her arm to keep her from hitting the ground. I remember living in a tent by a river, where I fell in and floated down the river under water bumping my knees on stones. I feared I was going to drown. I remember having rheumatic fever and couldn't walk until my Sunday School teacher prayed for me. A favorite memory was straddling the cold water tank when I went with Grandpa to Austin to get a tank of drinking water to fill up his cistern. Grandpa never learned to drive a car. Instead he drove a team of horses all of his life. Verna Hargrove never knew how poor her family was when she was young. But despite their lack of material wealth, Christmas was always a time filled with joy and wonder.