Kitty Clare Holmes Banning (1877 – 1962), known to all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren as “Gram,” was not a stranger to me from my family’s past. In the picture, she is holding me on her lap in the home of my maternal grandparents Clarence Banning and Genevieve Pelleymounter Banning on Selby Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota, around 1952. Among other things, I remember very well the skin of this woman who seemed ancient to me. I loved running my hand over the fine wrinkles on her arm. And every time I did that, my mother said it was rude and wanted me to stop.

Among the things she had tucked into her family Bible I found the following text Gram must have written in December 1945.

Christmas thoughts

Well, here it is, the first day of December, and it will soon be time for us to honor the birthday of the Christ Child.

I’m just sort of an elderly woman, washing dishes each day in a small-town cafe, and perhaps not capable of judging any one or anything, but somehow it seems to me that we have almost lost the true meaning / spirit of Christmas time.

We go to church on Christmas Eve, it’s true, and have a program of sorts, but at home do we emphasize the real meaning of the day to our children? We do not as a general thing. Most of the ideas these days before Christmas center on gifts, not especially to the sick or unfortunate, but mostly to just family and friends. And the more money spent on these gifts the better it seems to be to all concerned. People say, “Yes, but the children these days all expect so much more.”

Well, just whose fault is that. Not the children’s certainly, but the parents’, who, as it always seems, want to “keep up with the Joneses. Our ideas at Christmas time have surely been perverted.

It’s very hard this year to believe in “Peace on earth good will to men,” with the world in such chaos.

But, as I was walking to work yesterday, I met a group of small children on their way to school, and, seeing their happy faces and hearing their merry voices, I suddenly thought to myself, “Why, to these children the world isn’t chaos at all. It’s about the same as it has been always, to them. Their homes, their school, and their small parts in the community life have not changed so much. And, because this is so, it can’t be such a bad old world after all.”

And speaking of home, it seems to me that the words “Christmas,” and “home,” are almost interchangeable. Christmas and home! This year many of the mothers and fathers of this nation will be having the children all home again. The boys who won’t be home yet will be thinking of the folks back here, and longing to be home. And older mothers who are alone and have no home will be having happy memories of other Christmases when the children were all home.

While I was eating my dinner the other day at the cafe, a soldier boy on furlough came and sat in the booth with me and started a conversation. They were putting up the Christmas decorations and so, naturally, the conversation drifted around to the holiday season, and I asked him where he was last year at Christmas. He told me he was in a little town in France, and, that after they had their dinner (consisting mostly of K. rations) some of the boys began to sing “O little town of Bethlehem” and be said, “I’m not ashamed to say that I was the most homesick kid you ever saw.” And so, as I say, the words “Christmas” and “home” just seem to belong together.

I shall probably spend my Christmas alone this year, for the first time in my life. But my children, all of them, live some distance away and our soldier boys need the trains and busses to get home to their loved ones.

I hope there will be snow, and glittering icicles hanging from the eaves of happy homes where Christmas trees gleam in the windows, and evergreen wreaths tied with red ribbons, hang on the front doors. And I hope too, this year especially, that mothers will try to explain more fully than ever before to their children, the real meaning of “Peace on earth, good will to men.”

On thing we must all do, in these chaotic days, is to hang fast to our faith in God, and pray for a better world. And we must never let go of our trust and hope in the future, as long as there are little children, songs, and each year this holy day of all days, when we honor the birth of Christ.

                                                                                                                 K. Clare Banning

And he said, “I’m not ashamed to tell it, but most of us were crying before they finished singing, and I was the most homesick kid in the world.”