Christmas had always been a big deal in the Richardson home. My father loved Christmas. When it started snowing and the land was blanketed in white and the stark contrast of the bare trees against the snow’s diamond-like glistening filled our dining room’s picture window, my father would burst into carols. His favorite was Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.
”Through the years we all will be together,” he would sing in a booming baritone voice, ”If the fates allow… So hang a shining star… up on the highest bough! Oh and have yourself… a merry little Christmas… now…”
The song is very melancholy, yet somehow my father made it sound special and warm. I remember spending winter mornings curled up at his feet by the fireplace, listening to him sing quietly as he stared out the window at the majesty and sipping hot wassail.
“Christmas is a time of miracles, Kevin,” he said to me once, when I was seven years old. “It’s a time of forgiveness and redemption and hope for a new life.”
I remember thinking that Jerald Richardson was the strongest, wisest man in all of the world.
After my father died in August of 1991, Christmas was never the same again. It was hardest to deal with his death when Christmas came. I’d stare out at the snow and the leafless trees and, instead of seeing magic and beauty, I’d see bitterness and death. Christmas became a time of pain and heartache, a time of grief and searing memories… and somewhere in the last nineteen years I forgot that Christmas had ever been a time of miracles at all…
