Please accept my sincerest wishes for a joyful holiday season. Merry Christmas. May God bless you.
This is a Christmas of melancholy for me. Maybe I have reached the age where memories dominate my thoughts more than dreams. I don’t know.
I am celebrating an anniversary of sorts. This will be my 50th Christmas in Canada. I remember the day, when I was a little kid, walking out of the tunnel at Union Station to the streets of Toronto, where I pretty much grew up. We had taken an overnight train from Quebec City, where our ship landed on November 20, 1953.
There were four us. My sister, my parents and me.
My father’s family were staunch Lutherans from a small town in Germany. My mother was hurriedly shipped to this small town from Berlin by my grandmother after an event called Krystalnacht. They were Jewish.
When we arrived in Canada, my folks declared there would be no religion or politics in our family. They were leaving it all behind. As far as they were concerned, religion just caused grief.
We had no money. My dad didn’t have a steady job. We lived all together in one room in a house down at the Don River beside the Queen Street Bridge. That December in 1953, my dad walked the streets of Toronto looking for work. Things were desperate. There was no food in the house, he had a real sick kid (I had tuberculosis) and it was Christmas.
As he walked along Bloor Street, knocking on shop doors, he saw the spire of the Walmer Road Baptist Church. As he told the story to me later, he just decided to walk up the block and ask for charity. He had no where else to turn and a long walk back home with nothing to show for it.
Well, they took him in. They took us all in. They helped my dad find work. They helped me get better. And an Italian family named Rainier, stepped forward from the congregation to “sponsor” us.
Had it not been for the charity we received from the Walmer Road Baptist Church, there would not have been a Christmas dinner for us, never mind presents. I shall not forget their kindness. I will never forget the Rainier family.
They didn’t care who we were, or where we were from or anything. No application to fill out, just come on in, we are pleased to help you.
These good folks at the Baptist Church took us in and gave us Christmas dinner. We weren’t even Baptists. We were nothing.
The experience of that Christmas, 50 years ago, has never left me. I know today, that the greatest charity of all, is to help someone that you don’t know anything about. And then let them go without obligation and no demeaning boast or mention of what you have done.
So many times I hear people say, “Well, we have to help this guy out. He’s one of us.” And of course that is a good thing to do. But to give what you have to someone who isn’t part of your group or circle; to welcome them into your home — well, I reckon that is really something. I guess I think that because I have been the recipient of that kind of charity.
As it turned out, my folks never did become Baptists, or anything else. But they did help others. Immigrants. People who were down and out. Broken families, whatever. We took them all in. I shared my room so many times with so many different kids, I can’t remember them all.
I think the whole experience was the most important learning lesson of my life. I truly believe the notion that if you give you shall receive. If you give to others, it is entirely likely that you will
be giving to folks that you will never see again. But it is almost a certainty that they will give to others, the kindness they received from you.
Maybe they can’t give to others all the time. But maybe they will try as hard as they can to be kind to others whenever they can.
Maybe they would try to help others whenever they can for 50 years. If you do the math, it could really add up. The world could be a better place.
This Christmas, I’ll raise a glass and say a toast to Alex and Margaret Rainier. I have not seen them in 50 years. I don’t think they will ever know how many people their kindness actually reached.
I think that is what Christmas is all about.
Merry Christmas.
Heino Molls is publisher of REM.
By: Heino Molls
heino@remonline.com
