Free A Simple Christmas by Mike Huckabee

comfortable.
    In so many ways, I became a man that year. I was forced to face the realities of death and the uncertainties of life. I saw life in its ugliest form, when a disease robs a person of his strength, his pride, his privacy, and his ability to choose even the simplest things. More than being robbed of my youth, I was endowed with an extra dose of maturity and adulthood the very year I would become a teenager, 1968.
    Uncle Garvin lived through Christmas and died on April 6, 1968, when in the early morning hours of that day, two days exactly after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the voice of my dad woke me up as he climbed to the top of the attic stairs to tell me that Uncle Garvin had just died. He wouldn’t be alone ever again. But there was some satisfaction as the years went by that in those last four months of his life, he knew the love of a family that gave him a Christmas gift that was unlike any other we had ever given him. As best we knew how, we gave him the comfort of simple companionship even if it was sometimes difficult. Those last four months, he held to his faith and never once blamed God for his pain or acted or spoke with bitterness. But I’m certain that if we hadn’t taken him into our home, he would have died even sooner and experienced more pain than he did.
    God gives us many things, but the message of Christmas is that He loves us in person. His comfort wasn’t just in the pages of a book or the “vibes” of a spiritual experience. It was with hands that touched, arms that hugged, a voice that spoke, and eyes that exuded compassion that He showed us how much He loved us.
    My sister and I didn’t get much that year for Christmas. We had been prepared to not expect much because all our resources needed to be used to care for Uncle Garvin and there really wasn’t time for much else. But in many ways, it was one of our most meaningful Christmas experiences ever, not because it was a happy one, but because it wasn’t. It was meaningful because through it we learned that the real meaning of Christmas is not giving toys but giving God’s grace in person to someone who is no longer in a position to give back. It was a very simple Christmas, and maybe the best one of all.

4.
    Family
    â€œSon, don’t look too far up that family tree—there’s stuff up there you don’t need to see.”
    With that, my dad pretty well summed up much of the family history. Don’t get me wrong. There were certainly some admirable branches and twigs in that tree, but the family on both sides had plenty of scoundrels. It’s a miracle I ever got elected to anything. I think the local papers were too busy trying to conjure up controversy over idiotic nonsense like what we were eating at the Governor’s Mansion to bother doing real investigations into my bloodline.
    In my family, like most others, Christmas was the one time of year when we saw relatives we usually only saw at family reunions. Neither side of my family was particularly religious, so it was somewhat ironic that we made such a big deal out of a holiday that celebrates the birth of Jesus, seeing as no one ever really talked about Him at any other time of the year. It wasn’t that the clans were atheist or hostile to faith, they just weren’t really gung ho about the idea of getting dressed up on Sundays for church. That made sense, seeing as no one really had dress clothes, and in those days, people wore their “Sunday best” to church. Among the adult men in our family, “Sunday best” wasn’t really any different from “Monday best.” Kids usually had at least one white shirt and a clip-on black tie just for special events at school or a Christmas program at church.
    Many of the stories in this book only make sense if you know a little bit about my family. Brace yourself! I’m about to take you on a journey that has a not-so-noble beginning