Christmas memories

Each year, I cannot help but look back and think about the Boyer family Christmas adventures. Memorable Christmases include: Tokyo Disneyland on Christmas Day, a candlelight Hawaiian Christmas-eve service at the Mokuaikaua Church in Kona, Hawaii, meeting my son's bride to be for the first time and, of course, special times with family and friends. But, there was one Christmas that was very difficult - our first one in Taiwan.

The Boyers had moved to Taiwan in 1990 where I had accepted a position at an international missionary school. It was our first Christmas without family, in a country where Christmas was not celebrated. As it was so expensive to move, we had sold almost everything. Starting over has some benefits but it is much more difficult that one can imagine. Toys that the boys wanted were expensive so our gift giving was very limited. It was not one of the Christmas highlights, for sure.

In retrospect, I now understand that I was unable to see what I had been given because my focus was on all I had lost. When my eyes were opened to the beautiful Chinese people and the many benefits of this new culture, it was a little easier, though never totally the same.

Some lessons this experience has taught me:

• Appreciate each Christmas, each person, every moment! This will be the first Christmas for two of my administrators without their fathers. That's hard; Christmas will never be the same for them.
• Hold with an open hand what you have been given. I must release my grip on people, possessions and plans. Holding them with an open hands means they are no less held.
• Open your eyes and behold what you have been given - and be thankful!
• Open your heart to those around you who are experiencing a different Christmas this year, for whatever reason.
• Receive with gratitude and give unselfishly.

Lessons from our first Christmas in Taiwan still affect me today. Our second Christmas was much better; friends from Japan came to visit along with some neighbors on our street. But, that was also the Christmas that my wife got the flu on Christmas day and left me in charge of fixing dinner...which is another story.

Comments

[Rosa Say]

Dean, your post just gave me the greatest memory of a Christmas where the gift we all remember most was the tree itself; I truly can’t recall a single wrapped gift that ended up under it that year.

I’m the oldest of five children, and we were all teenagers and young adults this particular year when my mom saw a picture of a straw Christmas tree in a magazine and decided that we’d make one that year. She was flipping through the magazine in a doctor’s office, and the fact that someone else had already torn out the directions how to do it did not faze her for a moment. I will see if I can find an old picture to scan and share, for my mom was a crafty person who did wedding bouquets as a hobby – the tree ended up in a local art gallery when Christmas was over.

Longer story short, the tree turned out beautifully, but what an ordeal to get it created; we started right after Thanksgiving and the project took over our living room completely thereafter. My dad made a 7 foot tall conical chicken wire form that we all had to weave and tie straw into every night after dinner, which made for some interestingly long dinner-table conversations continued at the base of that tree. Oh the work! If you didn’t tie it into the form with raffia gravity took over and the next morning your work was all for naught, evidenced by straw “puddles” on the floor – there was no cheating.

We were all single then, and the silent agreement gift we gave my mom was that our holiday dates would just come to the house, join in, and learn the craft too. My husband is convinced that tree gave him some bargaining power in making the cut when he finally joined our family officially!