"I'll Be Home for Christmas..." I have to confess-- I have hated that song since my first Christmas after high school, my first Christmas alone. Somebody was playing a radio in the nearly empty barracks of my Basic Training company in Ft. Dix, New Jersey, on Christmas Eve, and that song came on.

I walked out into the humid, bone aching cold, so foreign to my dry High Plains blood, and wept like a baby.

"Everyone else" came from areas close to Ft. Dix. I couldn't afford to go home to Colorado. So I moped.

That was a terrible Christmas.

I spent several others halfway around the world in a US Army uniform; in an Asian jungle, the bitter cold of Korea, the snowy Fulda Gap, the Negev and other places, but those were never as bad. They may have been hellish, but hell shared in common with brothers in arms is never as intolerable as hell alone.

I'm not posting this to depress anyone. Truly I'm not. But I do want to ask all of you to say a little prayer for the young men and women serving in uniform on our behalf all around the World, of their own free wills, so you and I can be warm, cozy and safe throughout the Holidays.

When I hear that song now, I think of them.

I know I'll be praying that the day be hastened when they can all be Home for Christmas.

Best wishes for Happy Holidays to all!

Shalom,

John



Author: Mayan Solstice: A Novel of 2012 (http://www.createspace.com/3420054)

If you would know a man, observe how he treats a cat.-
from "The Door into Summer" (1957), chapter 1 (Robert Anson Heinlein)

Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own. (again, RAH)