I remember that old screen door slamming, and looking out into the night beneath a street light, hoping to see a flake of snow.

As a boy, I spent most every Christmas Eve in the pool hall back home in the hills, just a ways from the Big Piney River, not far from heaven. Dad and Grandpa McNew and I owned the pool hall on Main Street in the small town of Houston.

It was like a second home for me. All my friends were there, the old-timers like Bill Stalder and Jim Splechter and Jess Wolf. They were rivermen and outdoorsmen a lot like Grandpa Dablemont. In all, there were about a dozen of them who came in and watched the snooker games and talked about big catfish and hat-rack bucks and politics and religion.

There was Ed Davis, Saldy Reardon, Churchill Hoyt and General Romines and Norman Salyer, just to name a few. And then there were a few boys my age, like Bobby Goodman and Billy Bob Woods, both of them top-flight snooker players like me by the time they were 13 years old.

Dad set up rules to make it a place where anyone could come, and there was no alcohol or bad language tolerated when he and Grandpa McNew were there. Educated men who were a great influence on me came in quite often, like Virgil Davis and Coach Weaver, Doc Dykes and Shorty Evans, even a preacher or two on occasion.

Some folks back in Texas County will remember those names ... and remember me when I was a boy. Many of them occasionally see this column and shake their heads and say, “How did that kid ever amount to anything?”

I fooled a lot of my teachers too, who wondered for years how I ever got into college and actually graduated with the kind of grades I made as a kid. They never understood what a fine place that pool hall was for a boy who wanted to become a writer.

God does indeed work in strange and mysterious ways. I would, in time, write a book about that pool hall and the old men who came in there, and dozens and dozens of columns and short stories about the place. When it came to story telling, I was taught by the best of ’em, right there on the front bench.

On Christmas Eve, there were just a handful of the old-timers who didn’t have families, and didn’t want to be home all alone, and it was a joyous time. They weren’t so much the kind to sit around and be melancholy. Dad let me open up the back of the soda chest when Christmas Eve began to wear down, and give Nehi Christmas presents to all of them.

On occasion, I’d get a present or two myself, always something simple, like an old used pocket knife or a prized marble from someone’s boyhood days. A few times, someone would slip me a 50-cent piece and tell me to buy something special with it.

Once I got a second-hand Christmas card with someone else’s name blacked out with a pencil. It was a special card because it had a flock of mallards on the front. There was that time that Saldy Reardon gave me the $2 bill, and I have written about that memorable Christmas Eve before. (You can find that story on the website…www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com.)

The old timers told about great boyhood memories at Christmas time, back when a wondrous gift amounted to an axe or a couple of muskrat traps or a box of .22 shells. Much of the time there were no gifts at all, just home-made decorations on an evergreen tree.

“I ’member how we’d always cut a cedar tree about three foot high,” Old Jess said, one Christmas Eve. “It took up too much room in that little cabin to have it sittin’ ’round very long. But we’d make strings of decorations out’a popcorn threaded with a needle, and string ’em on that tree. Course with eight kids in that old cabin, sometime durin’ the night the popcorn would get et, so it never lasted long neither. We was just too danged hungry to leave popcorn hanging around for looks.”

Everybody laughed at that. These were all men that had known a little about hunger when they were kids. They were young at a time when there were deer and turkey and ducks still left in the Ozarks, and at Christmas time you ate wild meat or you didn’t eat much. Something like cheap hard candy or popcorn was a real treat.

When those old timers in the pool hall recalled Christmas gifts that moistened their eyes a little, and brought back memories of family members long passed, they were remembering little things, and gifts that were often hand-made.

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.