My parents tell of stories that they remember of Christmas when they were youngsters.

Both my parents were poor and they never had enough money for the amount of children in the family, but they worked and worked hard. Never did they apply for any welfare or assistance.

My mother and father both had to quit school and work when they were just children( neither of my parents have a high school degree). to help make ends meet.

My parents tell of storied of Christmas and how it was the best time of their lives and how simple and how they learned to appreciate things in life, due to the fact that they did not have the everyday things that children have today. ie. candy, the only time that they got candy was at Christmas when santa would leave them a few chocolate drops, peppermint sticks and a few pieces of hard ribbon candy. They recieved one apple, one orange. The dolls my mother recieved from santa where of composition, the doll would be ruined if it got wet, or broke, they would never recieve another doll throughout the year until Christmas. My parents stated that there were a lot of Christmas' that they never had a tree.

I think that today we are all so selfish and we have brought our children up to not realize the real meaning of Christmas. which is so sad.

I know that this Christmas I am going to try and relive my parents Christmas and be Santa for them I have already gotten the Lg Compostion Doll, the wind up 1920 train set and the candy. So when Christmas morning rolls around, they will have relived part of their past with just the things from Santa.

Thank you for the article, It was wonderful.

I wish everyone in Southeast Missouri, has a wonderful and Merry Christmas. From Northwest Missouri family.

A lump of coal that was, is now a diamond memory:

Back in the 1940s, times were hard for many in Kennett and elsewhere, us included, as our single Mother strived to keep the family together and siblings and I fed.

I will always remember and cherish one especially difficult Christmas. Mother had explained to us that money was scarce and gifts would be minimal, but hope springs eternal in the very young. I was bent on a shiny set of two cowboy repeating cap pistols with real leather holsters and belt. These were the ultimate cap guns of the time, you could put in rolls of red caps and with every cock of the hammer, bang away with a little puff of smoke to your heart's content when playing cowboys and Indians with other boys. (and oft girls, though they did have to be taught to fall down properly when you yelled, "I got'cha")

On Christmas morning I eagerly grabbed my marked gift, but with an immediate twinge of disappointment, for the package was suspiciously light of weight. On opening, I found a small black toy pistol with a pasteboard holster. Not seen today, these toy pistols were made from molded sawdust and glue, with no moving parts and painted black. Disappointed, yes, but I still wore it proudly on my hip all that Christmas day.

One of my chores was to fetch coal to feed the Warm Morning heater in the living room. As dusk fell, I was reminded to get a bucket of coal for the stove and another to last through the night. Now the coal we bought in those days was not of the pelletized variety often seen today, but came in pieces from small, to huge. At the coal pile, I took the hammer kept there and busted up enough big chunks of coal for two buckets, by now it was near full dark. With the first bucket of coal deposited in the stove and taking my six shooter this time, as one never knows what enemies may lurk in the dark, returned for the second bucket. I laid my holstered and trusty gun on a large lump of coal, filled the bucket and went back to the house.

A cold rain had come down during the night and was still falling the next morning when I went out to get coal. Horror of horrors as I espied what my eyes beheld. Atop the lump of coal, my sawdust and glue gun, along with it's pasteboard holster, had dissolved into an unrecognizable glob. Having forgotten and left my rig out overnight, the rain had wrought total destruction upon it. Yep, fearless cowboy now gone and like the little boy I was, I went crying to Mother.

Mother never said much about my woes, but a few days later she presented me with a gift of wonderment. Our Mother was always good at working with her hands, and in this instance she had taken a pine board, sawed, whittled and shaped it along with a wooden clothes pin into a rubber gun. I remember being fascinated as she took that cut strip of red rubber inner tube, placing it's loose ends into the clothes pin, stretching the closed loop out and onto end of the barrel. Taking aim, she gripped the handle, squeezed the clothes pin, and "splat," she shot the ironing board sitting in a corner across the kitchen. Forget cap pistols, I now had a real gun made by my Mother that would actually shoot.

And that is how a lump of coal came to be one of my fondest memories.