Gravel crunched beneath the tires of the old red pickup as it pulled into the winding driveway leading to the farm. The farmer looked over at his little girl, asleep in the passenger seat, and the corner of his mouth tilted up into a smile. Her head lolled on her shoulder, her arms hugged tightly to herself across the front of her faded sweater in a sleepy attempt to stay warm.
Snowflakes drifted from the sky as the truck meandered down the driveway, the dad driving slowly so as not to wake his daughter. The sun was setting at the rim of the world far away, casting long red shadows over the snow. It was the end of a fruitless trip to town, on a long and tiring Christmas Eve.
It was 1939, and although the depression was drawing to a close as the war in Europe loomed, many families still had no money for anything besides the bare necessities. That was true for many families in Kansas, and equally true on this farm. There wasn’t hardly a handful of pennies for Christmas gifts. Hence the fruitless trip to town; they had found nothing they could afford to buy.
They pulled up in front of the white farmhouse tucked among maple trees, their bare branches dusted white. The porch railings were frosted with several inches of the snow that had been falling for the past few days. “At least the kids will have a white Christmas,” the farmer muttered to himself, as he got out and stepped around the truck to open the passenger door.
Susie stirred as he lifted her into his arms, snuggling up against his wool coat. He noticed the tear stains on her cheeks, and his jaw tightened. Kicking the truck door closed, he trudged up the path to the front porch, careful not to jostle his precious burden.
The door opened as he reached it, light spilling out into the dusk, welcoming them in. The face of the farmer’s wife glowed in the shadows of the old farmhouse with delight to see them. “Shhh,” he whispered, and her eyes softened as she caught sight of Susie’s sleeping, tear-streaked face.
“No luck?” she whispered, and he shook his head in defeat. She squeezed his arm gently and laid her head against his shoulder, snowflakes from his coat melting in her hair. They stood there for a second in the entryway, father and mother and sleeping daughter, heavy with the weight of ten years of poverty and scraping and pinching to make ends meet.
The wife pulled away first, and shooed him up the stairs to take Susie to her bed. He carefully pulled his boots off, not wanting to muddy the clean, bare steps. While he carried Susie up and tucked her into bed, his wife stirred up the fire and made a cup of hot coffee, just the way he liked it. Ten years of marriage had taught her many things, not the least of which was how choosy her husband could be about a cup of coffee.
They had married in 1929, two kids in love with stars in their eyes, and been given the old homestead by his grandad. With their families just down the road and the harvest freshly gathered in, life was perfect.
When the stock market crashed a week later, all of their hopes and dreams for their marriage seemed to crash with it. With no money, little food, and no prospects, they made it by on love and prayer. When children began to come along, they pulled up their bootstraps and kept on keeping on. Somehow, they had made it this far. The country was pulling out of the depression, people said, but it didn’t seem to have made much difference to this little Kansas town.
The farmer slipped into the kitchen in his stocking feet and pressed a kiss to his wife’s hair before she was even aware of him. She smelled like cookies and evergreen.
“Sit down and drink your coffee,” she smiled, waving him towards the table. He sat and stretched his long legs out in front of him, resting his work-hardened hands on the scarred wood of the table top.
“I checked in on the boys on my way down, they’re sleeping soundly,” he said.
“They wanted to wait up till you got home, but they didn’t last past four o’clock. They’ll be up at the crack of dawn, no doubt.”
“To find no presents waiting for them.” He set his coffee cup down a little too hard, and the hot liquid splashed over the edges onto his fingers. She was by him in an instant, wiping the coffee off of his hands. He pushed the towel away and took her hands in his, drawing her to a seat on his knee.
“Darlin’…” his voice choked and he shook his head, looking at the floor. “I’m so sorry. We couldn’t find anything in town. Susie was pretty crushed, I’m afraid. I got the groceries you needed, and a few oranges, but that was all. It’ll be a pretty cheerless Christmas.”
She put a hand to his cheek. “Don’t even start,” she said softly. “We have each other, and that’s all we need.” She stood up. “Speaking of groceries, leaving them out in the snow isn’t the usual way, is it?”
He laughed and got up. “Nope. I’ll get ‘em.”
Darkness had fallen as he stepped outside, and a bitter wind had picked up. The farmer plunged his hands deep in his pockets and shuddered. Kansas winters were something else. He pulled down the tailgate of the truck and reached for the sack of groceries in the back. Instead of rough fabric, his hand brushed against something warm and moving.
“What in the world!” He jumped back from the truck. The moon chose that moment to look out from behind a cloud, and a tiny, furry golden head peeked out from behind the sack of groceries. The farmer stared for a moment in disbelief. Then he started to laugh quietly.
“Darlin’!” he called quietly, his voice brimming with excitement as he flung open the front door. “Look what we’ve got here!”
She came running, wiping her hands on her apron, and stared. Then she began to laugh with quiet wonder, shaking her head.
The next morning at the crack of dawn, the twin boys charged down the stairs, with Susie Jean following cautiously behind them. Peter and James almost tripped in their eagerness to get to the tiny Christmas tree in the corner of the room, festooned with popcorn strands and little calico bows made from scraps. They halted in their tracks as they neared the tree and didn’t see any packages beneath it.
“Where are the gifts?” Peter asked in a tiny voice of disappointment.
“I told you boys, we couldn’t afford any gifts this year,” Susie whispered fiercely. “Everything cost…”
“Look!” James said, pointing to the tree. Something was moving behind the trunk. The boys grabbed hold of their sister’s nightgown. “What is it?”
A golden puppy came into view, its big brown eyes full of sleep, a red bow tied around its neck. The children stared for a moment in wonder, then descended on the puppy with shouts of joy.
Luminous golden light filled the farmhouse to the brim that morning, as the farmer and his wife came down the stairs and joined the laughing romp with the new puppy. A stray that needed a home, there was no fear that anyone would come demanding it back. The farmer’s wife mixed up batter and flipped pancakes as the farmer got out his old worn Bible, handed down from his grandfather, and read the Christmas story to the children, their eyes wide with wonder. The puppy, tired out, snuggled in Peter’s lap and listened too.
It was a perfectly wonderful Christmas, one of the last before the sorrows of war entered their home and robbed the children of their father and the wife of her steady rock of a husband. The children looked back on that Christmas as one of the happiest of their lives.
In the eyes of the world, they had nothing, and yet they had everything. Light had come into the old farmhouse in the shape of a golden puppy, and the radiant dawn of Christmas day spilled through the windows like hope that could be tasted, just like the light of the star that shone over Bethlehem nearly 2,000 years before. There was love, running over in abundance, and warmth and safety and peace, a love that pierced their hearts and enabled them to bear the grief and loss of the coming years. As Susie said many years later to her own grandchildren:
“It was the first time, children, that I realized what Christmas really meant. If you have love, the Love that beats at the heart of the world, you don’t need anything else. The light of Love irradiates even the darkest of nights, and sustains us through the bitterest of sorrows.”
So it was in Christmas of 1939, and so will it be till the end of time.
The End
Of Words and Wonder 
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