Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Every week I sit down to write this column using the old issues of The Atmore Advance in 1990.
I seem to be running out of newspapers and I still have three weeks left to fill this space. I can do it, but it will be about other things.
If you don’t know, I live at The Meadows, an assisted living facility. Each week at least one of the residents asks me what I am going to write about. The truth is, most of the time I have no idea until I turn on the computer and start. I pull out the old bound volume and see what happened in the news (in my case, what happened in 1990).
Christmas is a special time of the year for most people when everyone is happy, buying special gifts, eating traditional meals and, hopefully, remembering that it is the birthday of our Lord. It is a happy time, or is it?
Christmas is a sad time for some people, and it is somewhat to me. I used to wonder why, and I think I finally figured it out, at least for me. I think I fell under the spell of television. Everyone on television is happy at Christmas and no one is sad, but it really isn’t so. Millions of people will go hungry and lots of children will expect things from Santa that parents can’t supply.
Now lets get to the fun part of the holiday. I don’t want to give you a case of the blues. I have been on this earth long enough to have had 80 Christmas holidays, many of them very happy. I do remember one Christmas when I was back where I grew up when I went with my mother to visit a cousin. My cousin, Kathleen, was in real estate and had bought a southern antebellum home. It stands on a hill with a pond on one side and a small river on the other. A big crowd gathered there one Christmas Eve and consumed mounds of special desserts while singing around the piano. It was like something right out of a Hallmark movie. My mother had a large loving family, and we loved to be together, so we spent at least part of Christmas at the home of my grandmother. Come to think of it, I have had pretty good Christmas Days.
Next week, I will tell you some Christmas stories out of my past.