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I have several.
My favorite is from when I was nine years old.
My dad was a Vietnam vet, and struggled to find work when he came back home to Missouri. So, he went to work at the dump as a garbage hauler. He was the guy that would ride around on the back of the garbage truck and throw everything in.
We lived in the Ozarks. I mean the Ozarks! Backwoods USA.
My parents, and the four of us kids, lived in a two bedroom 14X70 trailer on my grandparents farm. We owned a 69 Impala that my aunt gave us when Dad came home from the war.
Bottom line?
We didn't have very much money.
So that year my mom sewed us shirts and britches and homemade blankets. We went out in the woods on the farm and cut down a fir tree.
We did not have lights to hang on it. We made paper cutouts of snowflakes and hung an honest-to-goodness popcorn strand on it.
We had one of those great big wooden console record player/fm stereos that we would spin Christmas records on.
Life was grand.
Us kids thought we were big stuff! At that point in life I didn't know how everybody else lived.
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