“I am with you and always will be.”

Christmas Day is just a week or so away. Christmas Eve a day less.

Yesterday it rained. Gobs and gobs of wet stuff from the sky. Chilly, if not wintry, glove-and-cap weather. My granddaughter and I braved the elements to search for last-minute toys for a few children whose names had somehow slipped from the list and a special gift for one child whose birthday arrives soon after Santa’s late-night visits. I can hear your sighs of “What a shame, he never gets any birthday gifts.” There is a true ring to that latent lament. “Here’s your Christmas and birthday gifts combined,” he or she hears, only to find one present where two ought to have been. Now is the time for all good men and women to quit typing and keyboarding and run to the stores for an extra gift for our treasured few whose birthdays lie on the calendar too near the day of annual gift-giving. We salute you, the close-calendared boys and girls, and promise to remember your day, even though it falls so close to the day of great exchange.

To exchange is to give someone a part of yourself.

Today’s opening quote, “I am with you and always will be,” is from a nightly exchange between the Husband and the Wife in the 2013 Christmas story, “The Picture and the Card.”

“You are in my heart and always will be” is the couple’s morning exchange.

Only, as you will see when you read the story, this may not be needed on a certain morrow’s morn.

Keeping with our new tradition of posting the Christmas stories of years past, tomorrow afternoon I’ll post “The Picture and the Card” on the homepage.

Some places are more special than others. Perhaps there is a place and a time when everyday is Christmas Day, where the exchange of ourselves is once, always and forever, and no birthday can ever again be missed.

Grandpa Jim