Christmas Magic

This morning on Facebook, I posted a reference to one of my 2 favorite Christmas songs coming on the radio and wrote:

 

I know I'm totally in the Christmas Spirit when I'm driving to work down rte 52 after a wonderful Penns Table breakfast with Michael Rellahan, and I hear the opening chords to my favorite Christmas song...and as now seems to be a Christmas tradition, by the end, I have tears streaming down my face. Dang song gets to me every single year at least once. ‪#‎sucharomantic

And my sister Laurie asked why I like it so much and then mentioned how she has a fave song that she hasn’t heard yet but had rules about how she needed to hear it, which, not surprisingly, are my rules exactly, as she wrote:

 

“I own the song, but it has to happen organically - no cheats allowed! Guess I better stream Christmas music on my laptop as I wrap today, coz time is running out, and as the singer says, "It's Christmas time!" and...."Santa Claus is Coming to Town"!”

 

So I started to write her two good Christmas stories about the Bruce song, but decided to put them here instead:

 

1 - About 17 years ago, just before Cheryl and I got together, I was living alone at my Decatur Court house and was driving over on Christmas late morning to Mom and Dad's . Dad was really sick - temp well over 100 and was totally out of it. I was driving east on the rte 30 bypass, going up the exit ramp to rte 113, feeling melancholy and actually kind of depressed, wondering what it would be like when Mom and Dad were gone and feeling bad for their age and ill health, and thinking what a lousy Christmas it was and heck, here it was Christmas and I hadn't even heard the magical Bruce song. So I'm driving up the ramp, listening to WMMR and just in the midst of my self-pity, what do they start their noon Christmas rock block with? You guessed it! Totally made my day. And I started blubbering like an idiot with the biggest of smiles on my face.

 

And in the end, that may have been my favorite Christmas ever. In my memory of it, with Dad in the next room snoozing virtually all day, Mom and I spent hours just sitting at the dining room table, just talking. And I don’t know if we opened a single present the whole time.

 

2 – Then probably just a year or two later, the week before Christmas, and I’m driving my two awesome stepdaughters-to-be, Elissa and Evelyn, to the Exton Mall so they could do their Christmas shopping while Cheryl got some alone time back at the (same Decatur Court) house. We were just passing Whitford Road on rte 30 when, again, the song I hadn’t heard yet, but HAD to! Bruuuuce! I again got a little teary and told Liss and Evie about its importance to me and told them story #1 above, getting even tearier, and when I finished and there was a pause, when little 5 or 6 year old Evie blurted out “It’s a magical Christmas moment!!!”

 

And so it was.