Christmas Poems
Christmas Stories
A Visit from St. Nicholas
Christmas Carols
Songs and Hymns
Nutcracker Suite
Articles
Traditions

As Port drove the five miles from the campus to Iverhill, he turned on his car radio. The station he last listened to in the car was now playing demented Christmas music, and after listening to a few bars of a song about how Santa went crazy and massacred his North Pole workshop with a submachine gun, Port spun the dial for a more traditional Christmas song on the oldies station.

The oldies station played a Christmas song from the 1960’s, a female singer asking her beau to please come home for Christmas. Come home, Port mumbled. He knew he couldn’t go home, not back to St. Timothy’s. The year after Port graduated from high school and accepted a scholarship to Iverhill State, the city got its wish, forcing the diocese to close down the orphanage because the city claimed the building was structurally unsound. Three years after Port left St. Timothy’s, the ground where the orphanage once existed was now home to a 36-car church parking lot.

The road to Iverhill was coated with snow and ice, and Port knew the plows were few and far between on Christmas Eve. Driving slow enough to avoid any skids or ditches, Port stared at all the decorations along Iverhill’s Red Pine Road. Hand-built crêches assembled in front yards. Wooden Stars of David hanging from windowsills. Strings of lights stapled to house roof and wall. A hundred families sharing Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanza and every other religious holiday that brings families together in the last weeks of December.

It seemed like every house on Red Pine Road was covered with lights and decorations - except one small house on the corner of Red Pine Road and North Main Avenue.

The house looked almost bare, with no ornaments, no twinkling lights, no handcarved Nativity scene in the front yard. For a moment, Port thought the house was vacant or for sale - until he saw a boy in the front yard, not much older than seven or eight years old, sitting in front of a tree. Near the boy was a small toy shovel, and from what Port could see from that moment, it looked as if the little boy tried to clear snow from his driveway by using that tiny shovel - then got frustrated and sat down to cry.

The poor kid looks cold, Port thought. And that little plastic shovel - the kid might just as well have used a teaspoon to clear the snow away. He looked at his watch - there’s enough time for me to do a good deed and still get to the library, he thought.

With that, Port parked the car in front of the little boy’s house and rolled down his driver-side window. "Hey kid," Port called out.

"Yeah?" the boy said. Port could see tears of frustration steaming down the boy’s cheeks.

"That’s a pretty big driveway to shovel. You think you’ll get it done by Christmas?"

"I don’t know."

"Is that the only shovel you have?"

"There’s another one in the garage, but it’s too big for me to lift."

Turning off the car ignition, Port looked at the white-flaked driveway. He knew the ice scraper in his trunk wouldn’t clear that driveway any faster, but if there was a big shovel in the garage, he could get the driveway clear in about an hour, and then hit the library. "I’ll give you a hand, kid."

But as Port got out of the car, the little boy began to back away from the driveway, cautiously looking back at the front door of his house. "Um... my mom’s going to be home soon, and she’ll be mad if she sees strangers around the house."

"Don’t worry, kid," Port said, locking up his car. "We’ll make a deal. I’ll shovel your walk, and you can keep an eye on my car so that no ‘strangers’ steal it. Okay?"

The boy stopped backing up.

"Look, it’s an old car. A ‘74 Volkswagen Beetle. I hear those are rare - and you never know if some car thief might want it for his collection of rare cars."

The boy thought for a moment.

"Mister?"

"Yeah?" Port replied.

"The garage door sticks a little when you open it - that’s why Mommy doesn’t like to park inside the garage. But the shovel’s in there."

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