When I was growing up with my sister and brother in northern Michigan, the large and stately staircase of our old Victorian home at 416 8th Street was a marvelous thing. It was made of hardwood and was intricately mastered with beautiful panels of wood, five-foot wide steps and thick solid banisters that were finished to a shiny gloss. If we weren’t playing on the landing, we were sliding down the banister straddling it between our legs and sailing down to the bottom where a tower of wood would hold us up dangling, suspended several feet in the air.
Our neighbors’ favorite memory of us included the staircase also. The large window on the landing gave a view into our home between the first and second floor. On a night of a violent thunderstorm when I was home alone watching my younger siblings, a large crack of lightning and thunder sent us three screaming and running down the stairs. The wife next door happened to look out at that very moment and saw our scramble for safety. Hopefully, she was not looking when other things happened on the stairs, as in the time I pushed my sister down them in a childish fit of anger.
Personally, my favorite memory of the staircase happened each December. I would descend the stairs slowly and gracefully, perhaps like the women who lived there in their long dresses at the turn of the 20th century. I would hold my chin up high and take each step methodically, with my eyes locked in on our Christmas tree. My parents always placed the tree so you could see it through the doorway that faced the bottom of the stairs.
Mother always decorated it simply and uniquely in blue lights. The blue glow cast a peaceful glow for the long dark hours of winter. I would leave the stairs and walk over to the tree and go immediately to look at my favorite ornament to see the miniature nativity I hung at eye level. There were Mary, Joseph, Baby Jesus and the little lambs. The stable roof sparkled with glitter. No matter that the ornament was made of cheap plastic; it was there to celebrate Christ’s birth. Through the years, I have saved the ornament, now over 40 years old. I’ve been often tempted to throw it away because Baby Jesus has long since broken off. Only his mother and father remain of the original Christmas family.
However, I keep the ornament because it reminds me that in this day and age many have forgotten the real, central meaning of Christmas:
“A Savior which is born unto you, Christ the Lord.”
Christ Jesus gets lost in all the other strange and crazy ornaments and overshadowed by the gifts piled high under the tree, but the believers make a conscious attempt to keep our love for him the center of our activities by scheduling time for worship in our local churches and with our families.
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