Remembering a Child's Best Christmas

Remembering A Child’s Best Christmas

Papaw

Paul H Story Sr

Illustrations by Nelson Lynskey

AuthorHouse™

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Bloomington, IN 47403

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Phone: 1-800-839-8640

© 2010 Papaw. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 11/8/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4520-0080-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-0081-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010903578

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

To my grandchildren:

Izzy Jo, Payton Jacob, Chloey, Kevin Paul, and Dalton Joel

Contents

Chapter 1 The Family Meeting

Chapter 2 Life in the Country

Chapter 3 Great Anticipation

Chapter 4 My Responsibility for the Tree

Chapter 5 Selecting a Tree

Chapter 6 Back Home with the Tree

Chapter 7 The Long Wait

Chapter 8 Trek to Get a Battery

Chapter 9 Bud’s Garage

Chapter 10 We’ve Got Our Battery

Chapter 1

The Family Meeting

On a cold and rainy November night, now more than sixty years ago, my father said he wanted to discuss something with the family. I was eleven years old. My father, my eight-year-old sister Sarah, my four-year-old sister Nellie Faye, my mother, whom I called Diddie, and I were all gathered around the supper table.

My name for my mother came about years earlier when I was just learning to talk, attempting to say Daddy and Mommy. Somehow, the two got confused in my mind and I started calling my mother, Diddie; I continued to do so until she died. Strangely, I called my father by his first name, Thrower. I think I heard my mother calling him that, and when I mimicked her, they thought it was cute—so it stuck. In fact, they will always be Diddie and Thrower to me. I was always Paul to them, their only son.

We lived in a wooden shack in Ramer, Alabama. My father and mother had built that shack over the course of many weekend trips made from Montgomery, twenty-six miles away. It consisted of only