Christmas of 1978. My first ever away from the family. Here I was, in an area of North Dakota that I swore was colder than the North Pole. Another reason I was sure Santa wouldn’t stop by my barracks room. The complete lack of any Christmas decorations was probably another. No tree; no lights; no Nativity. I was making a grand total of $419.40 a month. Before taxes. Before Social Security. Before beer. Real trees were impractical. Artificial trees were expensive. So were strings of lights.

So on Christmas morning of 1978 my dorm room looked like it did the other 364 days of that year. No tree, no lights, no presents. Not that it really mattered. To add insult to injury, I had to work that day. At least we had a tree and some decorations at the motor pool. Provided by our female co-workers and a couple of the top sergeants. But for me, they didn’t have any meaning. It might as well have been a store display. None were family heirlooms. I hadn’t hung any of them. The tree was business like, and had about that much charm.

Work was followed by Christmas dinner; a slab of dry turkey, smothered with a gravy that may have had a basis in turkey, with mashed potatoes that came not from a spud, but from a bag of granules. Only made edible by more of that gravy from an unknown source. Some sort of vegetable was also on my plate. I don’t recall which one, so it was probably passable.

But the strange thing about military life: it creates families. One of the guys I worked with was there with his family, in base housing, but the wife and kids had gone home to Idaho for the holidays. So he invited some of us over for Day After Christmas celebration. Having spent time in England before his assignment to the frozen north, he called it, appropriately, Boxing Day.

The crowd swelled and waned, as people came and went. The tree was lit all day, standing in the corner like a shimmering beacon, attracting the crowd. We ate, drank and exchanged gifts; usually some form of intoxicant. And played with his boys toys. All things I would have done at home. With my real family.

That night as I walked back to my room, some of the gloom and doom attitude I had woken up with the day before was gone. As always the Lord had provided what I needed, a family to be with to celebrate His birth.