Small kindnesses, especially during this joyous season, reverberate through the years.

My Uncle Anthony was not a generous man nor one given to many acts of kindness. This attitude extended to his wife’s family, which included my mother. With my father hospitalized as Christmas 1944 approached, money for holiday decorations, a tree, or presents was non-existent in my house.

In that wartime year, all three were generally in short supply for everyone. Daily, newspapers talked of the Christmas tree shortage with most tree sellers denuded well ahead of Christmas Day.

But two days before Christmas, Uncle Anthony appeared at our door with a scrawny tree, colored lights and a box of ornaments. Silently, he set up the tree, smiled at me, a toddler, wished my mother Merry Christmas and left. To her last holiday season, my mother unfavorably compared every decorated tree to the one he somehow found.

At her funeral, I asked him their origins. Smiling tightly as was his want, he reported fixing the broken light string after finding them discarded in an ashcan. The box of ornaments cost him one dollar and the tree was left in the back of a sold-out tree stand.  Regardless, they meant the world to us that terrible Christmas.

We speak of my story this Holiday Season to give us all incentive to do some act of kindness to others. For acts of love are what really marks the Holiday Season as special and memorable.

Don Mazzella

3 0xbridges Inc
JoAnn Laing
Donald Mazzella