Please Welcome Multi-Published Author Jane Toombs!

CHRISTMAS WISHES by Jane Toombs




The Holiday Season can be a joyous time with friends and family or a lonely time for those who either can’t be with family or have none. But with the Internet or TV, even the lonely can participate by posting to a group or by watching. Not quite the same, but better than the sadness of nothing.



I remember times when I was young that I couldn’t be home for Christmas, but I was surrounded by others who couldn’t either and thus not really so lonely.



This year, like last, the Viking and I may be invited to have Christmas dinner with his brother’s widow and family. Which we do enjoy. We can’t travel to California or any other place where either his children or mine may live, and it’s too far from them to come here. But we're together, which is very important to both of us, as you’ll find as you get to be old fogeys like we are.



We’re both grateful for the fact we’re together, and it came about as a fluke. We grew up in the same small village, but had never met until the fateful January day when my first grade teacher brought me, at six years of age, into the second grade room to meet my new teacher and classmates, because I’d been “skipped” there. I was assigned the seat in front of seven-year-old Elmer. He always claimed he fell in love with me then and there. As for me, I was so scared that I didn’t notice him or anyone.



Though we were friends throughout school, when we graduated, we went our separate ways and married others. Skip to 1994. He called me on April Fool’s Day in Upstate New York from Nevada to tell me he’d read a book of mine called Jewels Of The Heart and wondered if the Swedish hero was based on him. Since he was the only Swedish male I’d ever known very well, I had to admit that maybe he was. In the course of conversation, he learned I was a widow and I learned he’d been divorced for eight years. Furthermore, he learned I was attending a wedding in lower Michigan in June on the same weekend he was attending a family party only forty miles away. We both recognized Fate was beckoning, so we arranged to meet on that Sunday.



How wonderful to find we could simply take up where we’d left off so many years back. Neither of us has been lonesome since.



Though the above was not what I was thinking of when I wrote “Are You Listening?” for the Christmas Wishes Jewels Of The Quill Anthology, it was a wish come true for both of us.



Note: If you'd like to comment on your own Christmas wish, realistic or not, and why you have it, I'll choose one of the commenters to send "Christmas Wishes" to, providing you leave me an email address so I can reach you.


Jane Toombs
http://www.janetoombs.com/