Family together - "Christmas Story"

Last night, I had my immediate family (mom the matriarch, sis, bro, and niece) over for a home-cooked meal. I barely arrived home from the grocery store before they showed up, but fortunately I'd already prepped a few things earlier in the day. I swear they musta made a pact to go easy on me and "if you can't say anything nice, well...." because I noticed they were so so patient and cool with everything. It's as if they (particularly mom and sis) left their critical mode batteries at home, and this was very relieving. I confined them to the front room--it was the least cluttered of the house--and strictly forbade them from following me into the kitchen. It was fun playing chef for 90 minutes, emerging from the cocina with bowls and plates of steaming victuals (potato soup, bratwurst, sauteed spinach, french bread, and more) as they munched and chatted among themselves. Once I sat down to join them, for a cup of Mexican hot chocolate and a cup of soup, they seemed content and relaxed by the meal. It was the right time to read them something, which was "Christmas Story" by John Henry Faulk an Austinite who tried to have a career in radio broadcasting in spite of rampant McCarthyism. I just heard Faulk's reading of this story on NPR the other day, and it officially put me in the holiday way. The story, which you too can hear Faulk read, helps me imagine the Depression-era christmases my own father musta had, back in west Texas in the early 1940s. By the end of my own living room reading of the story for my family last night, we were all teary-eyed and full of w.f's (warm fuzzies).

Side note: During the 1980s, Faulk traveled the nation urging students to be ever-vigilant of their constitutional rights and to take advantage of the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. The Center for American History at UT-Austin sponsors the John Henry Faulk Conference on the First Amendment, and the Texas Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Handbook is dedicated to the memory of Faulk.