Deborah Raney is the author of Silver Bells, from the Songs of the Season series.
I went back to the years of my childhood to write my newest novel, Silver Bells, a Christmas story set in the early 1970s. What struck me most about reliving that era is that during a volatile time in our nation’s history, being with those I loved brought peace in the midst of conflict, hope in the midst of fear.
Though war raged and we all knew someone who’d lost a loved one in Vietnam, still, when we gathered around our supper table on the Kansas farm where I grew up, nothing could shake the security I felt in my loving family and in the tight-knit community that nurtured us all.
At Christmas, that love seemed multiplied a thousand times, like the snowflakes that floated from a gray sky and settled around us like a comforting blanket. With lights twinkling from every window and the scent of Christmas cookies wafting from every home, life seemed precious beyond words, and love was as timeless and holy as the gift of pure love that God sent that very first Christmas when Jesus was born.
After a supper of potato soup and my mother’s homemade bread spread thick with fresh-churned butter, we would attend the Christmas Eve service at our little country church. Then, home with our brown bags of peanuts-in-the-shell and ribbon hard candy, we’d huddle together around the Christmas tree to have our annual family Christmas program. No one would have dreamed of opening presents before we acknowledged Baby Jesus’s birthday with the reading of the Christmas story from Luke Chapter 2, followed by some sort of musical number or poetry reading. I think the most memorable program was the year my little brother filled soda pop bottles with varying amounts of water and blew across the tops for a lovely, if comical, rendition of "Silent Night."
We didn’t have a lot of money in those days, and with five children in our family, the presents were new boxes of crayons, paper dolls, socks and underwear. One year my parents stayed up long after our bedtime building, painting and decorating a little plywood refrigerator and stove––one that their grandchildren would play with decades later. The gifts might have been humble, but no shiny bicycles or transistor radios could have brought more joy than those meager gifts given in love.
The simplicity of the gifts helped us focus on the reason we celebrated––the birth of a holy babe each of us has continued to place at the center of our families’ lives. Even through the sadness of losing one of my sisters in a car accident, and recently, moving our mother into assisted living apart from our dad, it is still God’s love that binds us all together and fills us with the hope of heaven, personified in that Christmas baby who grew up to save the world.
