I think it was Jack Fogg who talked about a hand-made sled that was such a great gift when he was a boy, and the winter which came after was the only one he ever remembered when there wasn’t any snow. His dad had to put wheels on it and give it too him for his birthday a couple of months later as a wagon.

I reckon maybe it is those days in the pool hall as a boy, listening to those old men and understanding what life was like for them that makes me shake my head when I hear those news people on television talking about how hard things are getting. If these are hard times I’m a left-wing liberal!

Here we are complaining in a day and time when the poorest of us are what those front bench regulars would have called affluent.

Our children have no idea what hard times really were. We live in a time of so much extravagance and plenty, and we expect things to just get better. Today’s union workers, many of them who never finished high school, make $70 an hour and they are hoping for a government bailout. Some of those men in that pool hall never once in their life made $70 in a week of hard work and never once got a penny from the government.

Why were they were so happy? How come they expected so little of the government and lived so independent and strong? Maybe it is because they didn’t have credit cards! You know, this generation can look back on them and feel bad for them for what they didn’t have.

But I think we are going to have some bad times ahead simply because we have lost so much of what they had.

When I was a kid it was Christmas, not “the holidays.” And I remember a whole society of people who never even kept track of whether Christmas sales increased one year over the other.

As the screen door slammed and everyone filtered out into the cold night and Dec. 24h wound down, Dad came to lock up the pool hall and take me home. And the Front Bench Regulars pulled up their collars and headed for old pick-ups and little farmhouses along gravel roads. I heard one of them say as they scattered into the night, “What a great time it was to be a kid.”

And that’s what I am thinking even now about those times when I was young.

I hope my grandsons can say the same thing someday, recalling Christmas on this old country ridge-top where their Grandpa cut his own firewood and ate venison, and reminded them that this is the day that Jesus was born.

May you and your family enjoy Christmas like you did when you were a kid, when times weren’t so hard.

Address correspondence to Larry Dablemont, Box 22, Bolivar, Mo., 65613. Send e-mail to lightninridge@alltel.net, check the Web site www.larrydablemont.com, or call (417) 777-5227.