Free A Simple Christmas by Mike Huckabee Page A

but is still truly remarkable and proves the power of perseverance and the presence of hope.
    As best I can tell, the Huckabee side of the family originated in England, around the Liverpool area, and the name means “people of the hill.” I actually looked it up once while visiting Liverpool, and that’s the best I can figure. I was hoping I might be related to Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, or Ringo Starr, but if there’s any connection, they have long since paid to cover it up. When I was a kid, I had heard that the Huckabees were of Irish descent, but during a 2009 trip to Ireland, my research revealed that the Irish claimed no responsibility. They did acknowledge that some of those English Huckabees might have slipped across the Irish Sea, but they were pretty sure they were turned away and sent swimming back home.
    I do know that the Sons of the American Revolution have never called and said they would love to have me. My folks didn’t come over on the Mayflower, and their first American address was not Jamestown but Georgia, as best we know. I assume that means they were dumped out of debtor prisons in the old country, placed on boats like cargo, and dropped off on the Georgia shores to fend for themselves. That’s not altogether a bad thing, since the clan did turn out to be a resourceful and resilient lot despite the fact that they were poorer than the dirt they lived on for most later generations. If there was a rich Huckabee in my ancestry, it was a better-kept secret than the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa. I’m sure there wasn’t one, but if there was he probably would have kept it quiet to avoid having the rest of the family move in and rob him blind.
    I can’t verify the veracity of some things I’ve been told, for example, that some of my ancestors were horse thieves or that more than one Huckabee concluded his life at the end of a rope, having been administered a rather outdated form of frontier justice. When asked about these stories, I prefer to say that “they were participating in a public ceremony when the platform on which they were standing suddenly gave way and they were killed almost instantly.” (That level of creative “spin” came in very useful in my life as a political figure!)
    Supposedly, once those early Huckabees landed in the young and still-developing United States in the late 1700s, they scattered like fugitives to places like Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama, with some staying in Georgia. Because they weren’t well educated and couldn’t spell much better than they could avoid the long arm of the law, there were (and are) many variations of the spelling of the name “Huckabee.” I want to point that out so you don’t think that the variations were simply aliases. I’ve seen it spelled Huckaby, Huckabay, Huckabe, and Huckaba. There are probably other spellings, but those folks probably don’t want to claim kin to me any more than the rest of them.
    Because my name is somewhat unusual, I was instructed not to immediately say yes when someone asked if I was “kin to the Huckabees who lived in Albany, Georgia” (or anywhere else, for that matter). I was told that I shouldn’t volunteer that information until I knew why I was being asked. “There’s a good chance that the other Huckabees owed those folks some money, and they might be expecting you to pay up,” my dad said. So, if your name is Huckabee (or any variation of it), unless you have photos of us together at Christmas, I don’t know you and we aren’t related. (But we probably are!)
    But speaking of Christmas, isn’t it funny that at Christmas people we barely know pile in and get chummy for a big meal, or even a few days, when we’d all probably find it easier to hang out with coworkers or neighbors, since we really know them better than we do our relatives. It’s awkward for all, and yet in a