Christmas at the Save-A-Rama Wonderland

The other day a friend asked me, “How did you know your father loved you?”

I was taken a little off guard, probably because my father has been gone for more than forty years now and thoughts about him aren’t as frequent as they used to be, but still some memories are as vibrant as the day they happened.

Like this one:

It was a snowy Christmas Eve in Wheaton, Illinois. I am a 10-year-old fourth grader. My younger brother, older sister, and I are already in bed and our parents are downstairs secretly wrapping presents, but there is a problem.

My parents had scraped around to buy me a beautiful violin … a violin that was several steps beyond the starter violin I had been using. They spent more money for me on that one gift than they had on both of my siblings combined.

But I was a child. Would I understand?

“She won’t be happy with this,” my father said. “She will feel slighted and won’t understand why her brother and sister have a lot of gifts and she only has one.”

My mother agreed and so my dad climbed the stairs with my winter jacket tucked under his arm. He gently shook me and said, “Come on Lovie Doe (my father’s nickname for me), we’re going on a little Christmas adventure.”

With my nightgown peeking out from underneath my coat, my father drove us to the edge of town to the ONLY store that was open on Christmas Eve. It was flashing its name in Las Vegas-style neon lights … the Save-A-Rama.

Now the Save-A-Rama was the mother of all bargain stores. Bare bulbs hung over metal racks filled with boxes of towels, tools, tennis shoes, basketballs and baseball bats. TV trays and black and white TVs – all 1950’s luxuries – were all there for a steal. Leftover dolls and stuffed animals and games were there … everything a kid could ask for – except there were no violins. They even had a blue light special that flashed over sale merchandise while a siren went off.

I was only 10, but even I could see it was a dump! It was 10 P.M. on Christmas Eve and I wondered what we were doing there. The place was deserted except for my dad and me. Standing at the door looking out over the aisles of picked through merchandise that spilled over the cardboard boxes and onto the floor, my father said something that transformed the Save-A-Rama into a wonderland.

“Lovie Doe,” he smiled, “you can have anything you want. Anything at all in this whole store…it’s yours!

I had never heard those words in my whole life…”You can have anything you want,” and I can assure you, I haven’t heard them since.

That night, I went down every aisle, slowly examining everything. I didn’t want to waste this opportunity. About an hour later … an hour that had been filled with wonderful possibilities, I finally decided. We drove back home that night with my brand new gold Bulova watch with its stretchy wristband on my arm and my head cuddled into my father’s arm and my heart bursting with love for my Dad. My hero, my champion, the man who could introduce me to wonderlands like the Save-A-Rama, the great love of my ten-year-old life.

And that’s when I learned that giving isn’t about violins or Bulova watches for that matter.

Giving is about making sure the people we love know it. It’s not about how much we spend, but about the extra thought, the going out of our way, the sacrifice, the inconvenience, the care that says “I love you!” to the people in our lives. That’s what sticks.

Most importantly, this 2020 Christmas I will remember the extent God went through to give us his love in a way we could understand it. His son, born in the “Save-A-Rama” of inns – a feeding trough, a manger in a stable fit only for animals – born to a world that groaned with inhumanity, paganism, and abuse of power, but because God gave us his son, it was a world that would never be the same. Jesus was the hinge of history, the greatest before and after the world has ever known.

• His influence civilized the pagan world.
• He introduced us to forgiveness, humility, treatment of enemies, respect of women and children.
• When he proclaimed that there was “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free. You are children of God through faith.” That equality became the ideal that permeated the hopes of constitutions, governments and this world ever since.

Today, the world groans under the oppression of a terrible pandemic. But this we never doubt: we are loved.

How do we know?

Because God gave his Son, what was most precious to him. That’s what Christmas is all about; the extent our Father went through to show us His love.