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school prop department, the domed pot that symbolically held the frankincense brought by the travelers from afar.
    With a soft chuckle prompted by his nostalgia, Emil recalled fondly how after each Sunday school pageant, the church deacons would hand out bags of hard candy and peanuts to each of the participants in the performance and to all the kids in the audience. How exciting it was to open those bags and look to see if yours contained a small toy, such as a tin whistle, a miniature Santa, or a decoration that you could put on your Christmas tree at home.
    As he allowed the music and memories to carry him back to earlier, happier Christmas times, he saw himself no longer as a thirteen-year-old, but as a high school student, listening with open adoration as Rachel, the girl he would one day marry, sang a solo rendition of “Come, O Come Immanuel” for her part in the Sunday school pageant.
    And then he moved ahead in time to another Christmas, when Rachel and he sat with pride as their daughter Connie stood before the altar with the other ten-year-olds and sang, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”
    Soon tears were streaming down his cheeks, and since he hadn’t brought a handkerchief, he had to get up and walk out of the church to get a tissue from the men’s room in the basement. He had seen Marlin’s father squeeze into a back pew just a few minutes before the three wise men sang, so he guessed he finally got the car started and Marlin would have a ride home.
    Emil Gunderson sat in his pickup in the parking lot for several minutes before he turned the key, started the motor, and headed for home. He would call his sisters and his brothers in Washington state that next day and wish them a Merry Christmas. And he would discuss plans to visit them that spring before fieldwork started.
    A thirteen-year-old boy in his Sunday school costume of kingly robes and turban, half-frozen in the December cold as he tried to walk to the church pageant, had rekindled the warm glow of Christmas in a heart that had forsaken the mystery of the season and exchanged it for the misery of a grief that had been nurtured for far too long. Just as the Christmas story tells of three wise men from afar who brought gifts to the newborn Prince of Peace, so did a little “wise man” prompt a gift of renewal to a reborn soul.

E unice York from Tulsa, Oklahoma, remembered that on her husband Sam’s last birthday before he passed away, he had received two elaborately decorated cakes—one from his family, the other from a fraternal organization in which the Yorks were active. Even at sixty-two, Sam had retained a childlike enthusiasm for birthdays and holidays—especially Christmas and Halloween— and he had been moved to receive two birthday cakes, both delivered on September 29 to their door.
    Eunice’s birthday fell on December 26, and because she had come from a large family that had never had any extra cash for the observation of two special days in a row, she had been accustomed since childhood to having her birthday passed over without notice. Maybe a birthday card. Perhaps a present of stockings or a handkerchief. But never a decorated cake with candles and a personalized greeting written on the frosting.
    Of course, the situation had changed after her marriage to the gregarious and fun-loving Sam, but on his last birthday she teased him about his having received two extravagantly large birthday cakes when she had gone so many years without having been given any cakes at all.
    â€œWell, then, by golly, Miss Eunice,” Sam laughed. “This year I’ll see to it that you receive two big special cakes on your birthday, too.”
    Eunice appreciated his good-natured thought, but she only shook her head and replied: “Your head will be so full of Christmas, like it is every year, that you will forget all about my receiving even one cake.”
    Sam placed one hand on his chest and raised