With much of the nation frozen over the Christmas holiday weekend and seeing social media posts from family and friends back in Upstate New York, I was reminded of Christmas 1981 which had an extreme cold (dipping to -19 degrees overnight) Christmas Eve/Christmas morning.
I was in college and had a part-time job working for a commercial radio station in Utica. And the pay was $3.10 an hour and lucky me was assigned midnight Christmas morning to 7am shift. The studio was at the end of a dead-end road near a frozen over swamp (ideal conditions for an AM tower) and the shift called for eight Christmas songs an hour. At about 1:oo AM, the studio phone rang and it was probably someone requesting a song while assembling some complicated toy. I answered the phone with the station’s call letters followed by “Merry Christmas.”
“You need to help me,” said an out-of-breath man on the line.
“What can I do?”
“My buddy and I loaded presents for our two families in the car and went inside to warm up. We left the car running with the heat on. When we came back out, the car was gone. The radio is set to your station. Please tell whoever took the car to keep it, but leave the presents somewhere where we can get them,” he said. His voice was a mixture of anger, anxiety and shock. He had already called police and the county sheriff’s department. and gave them the description of the car and the tags.
I got on the air and told listeners what had happened. I described the car. I gave our the studio phone lines and asked the thieves to call me if they decided to leave the gifts somewhere where they could found and retrieved. I told the thieves (if they were listening) the police were already looking for them. I called other stations to tell them what happened so they could get in the air and urge the thieves to surrender the gifts.
I wrote up the news story for the news director so he had a lead story for Christmas morning newscast. We kept the families names off of the story for privacy, and I have long forgotten who they were.
The story has no happy ending. The stolen car was found, I think two days later. All of the gifts were opened. Some were missing. The car was trashed. I was interviewed by the RKO Radio Network about “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.” It gave me no joy to be on a national radio network for a soundbite.
Yesterday, I contacted the local newspaper for an archived version of the news story to fill in the gaps for me. And I’ll post the article when I can score it.
Now the children of those two families would be in their 40s or 50s today. The thieves, 50s to 60s or 70s. I often wonder what the parents said to those children that morning who woke to no gifts from Santa. How did those children react? How did this crime affect the families each holiday season thereafter? Do the thieves have any remorse? Did they ever come forward? Were they ever caught?
I’ve told my own kids this story enough that they never need to hear it again. Their takeaway is the Holidays are never about things and gifts don’t always need wrapping paper. This is my first Christmas after losing a brother to a chronic disease accelerated by contracting COVID-19 about 11 months ago. And it’s the first Christmas without hearing his voice. To make up for it, I’ve been checking up on aunts and uncles, cousins, old friends. And it’s been wonderful.
So by all means, enjoy those new gifts you unwrapped on Sunday morning or Saturday night. But don’t forget the gifts that surround you every day.