A Pair of Hopalong Boots
Christmas Belles, by Winslow Homer. From "Harper's Weekly", January 2, 1869, p.8
Dear Parents,
I absolutely love the Johnny Mathis version of “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.” My admiration for the song began many years ago, when my son Luke was in third grade.
It was around Christmas time when his teacher, Irene Lyons, had requested that Luke practice his handwriting for 15 minutes each evening. During that first practice session, with Luke still clad in his school uniform and sitting at the kitchen table, he started humming that tune.
Every now and then, at just the right moment, his hum would turn to lyrics. “A pair of hopalong boots and a pistol that shoots is the wish of Barney and Ben.” Without missing a beat he would return to the humming and then back to the words with a flourish, “And mom and dad can hardly wait for school to start again.”
Thankfully, I had my phone at the ready and was able to record Luke covertly until the 15 minutes of practice was over. The way he moved through the song was priceless, even doing a bo-bo-ba-bo that made his version so endearing.
That memory of Luke, and that song, has stuck around all these years and comes up frequently, not just at Christmas.
I think the part of the song that is most meaningful to me lies in this line: “But the prettiest sight to see is the holly that will be on your own front door.”
Christmas draws us home.
In our November parent gathering where we discuss Charlotte Mason’s writings, we read “A Happy Christmas to You” from Formation of Character. In this chapter, Mason makes an interesting observation when she writes that “there is no one thing of which it is harder to convince young people than that their parents love them.”
Why does Mason bring that up shortly after talking all about the joy and delight that comes from having everyone home at Christmas? It’s a profound statement, and she comes around to explain it by the end.
Mason urges parents to use this set apart time at Christmas to show their children that they love them, despite their faults and failings. She encourages us with this:
“Actions do not speak louder than words to a young heart; he must feel it in your touch, see it in your eye, hear it in your tones, or you will never convince child or boy that you love him, though you labour day and night for his good and his pleasure. Perhaps this is the special lesson of Christmas-tide for parents. The Son came — for what else we need not inquire now — to reinstate men by compelling them to believe that they — the poorest shrinking and ashamed souls of them — that they live enfolded in infinite personal love, desiring with desire the response of love for love. And who, like the parent, can help forward this "wonderful redemption"? The boy who knows that his father and his mother love him with measureless patience in his faults, and love him out of them, is not slow to perceive, receive, and understand the dealings of the higher Love.”
What is one way to convey this kind of love to a young heart? She goes on with a very practical suggestion that every one of us can do.
“... take your big schoolgirl in your arms just once in the holidays, and let her have a good talk, all to your two selves; it will be to her like a meal to a hungry man. For the youths and maidens—remember, they would sell their souls for love; they do it too, and that is the reason of many of the ruined lives we sigh over. Who will break down the partition between supply and demand in many a home where there are hungry hearts on either side of the wall?”
In taking this approach to initiating and communicating love to our children, in a language they can understand, we are following the very example that Jesus gave us in Christmas. He made Himself available to us by becoming like us. He crossed over the great divide that separated us and gave all of Himself to demonstrate how much we matter to Him.
As a parent, it’s easy for me to relate to that kind of love.
In this Christmas season, I pray that all of our children would know our love for them as parents, that we would show it to them in a way they can understand, and that it would enable them to receive and understand God’s higher love for them.
And I pray that my heart — and yours — will be able to receive His love more deeply too.
