We were both voracious readers as children; my favorite books are her favorite books. She and her husband now own a bookstore in Nashville, Indiana, which specializes in hard-to-find titles. So on Christmas morning I’m likely to receive a copy of cherished but little-known books I adored as a child. Who else but my sister could know how I loved a series of 1950s teen books featuring stewardesses and would send me my very own copy of Hostess in the Sky?
One beloved pastime of our childhood was what we for some reason called “Personal Business.” We each had something called a “pegboard box,” a rectangular wooden box with a sliding cover with small holes over all it, in which you could place plastic pegs to make a pattern or a picture. The pegs had long been lost, so we used the boxes as containers for everything we needed to collect before we climbed into our twin beds to do our Personal Business: a book to read, a pad to write poems on, maybe one of those metal looms with fabric loops for making potholders. Of course, many decades later, the boxes themselves had disappeared into the mists of time. But then one Christmas several years ago, I opened a rectangular present and—yes—it was that same pegboard box!! My sister had found one for each of us on E-bay. Lucky I am to have a sister who lived with me so closely and knows me so completely.
This, I’ve come to think, is the whole point of Christmas: God coming into the world to live among us, to be fully human as well as fully divine, to know the joys and sufferings of our heart because He has shared human experiences, from birth in a manger to death on a cross. He knows us because He has lived side by side with us. This is what makes Him, on Christmas and always, our best gift.
—Claudia Mills
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