Scanning back issues of the Gasconade County Republican I ran across the following column by my Uncle Tom Warden. Enjoy.
Out here in these frosty foothills of the Ozark Mountains, the weather is always a topic for friendly conversation… and folks in these parts generally are not exactly happy to see winter arrive.
Perhaps it is a symptom of the mellowing caused by years, but winter to me is but another season to be properly savored and enjoyed. Oh, it has its ups and downs — especially when ice and snow tend to make our daily existence a drudgery.
But winter, in its own way, is as intriguing as the other seasons. Such an abiding consolation, I might add, does make the season pass rapidly.
Our November concerns about the weather always seem to overshadow the December realization that only a few weeks remain until Christmas. There are things to be done other than split and stack firewood. That most frustrating chore of all, buying Christmas gifts, is also yet undone.
The commercial aspects of Christmastime are overwhelming in December — much like the weather — when the singular national commitment is a preoccupation with buying gifts.
This year we are caught up in a media blitz to purchase Cabbage Patch dolls or Care Bears. Last year, as I recall, it was computerized games.
I am not adverse to the gifting tradition; I do resent the constant implication that almost every item offered is described as the “perfect gift.”
The perfect Christmas gift, by my way of thinking, is one that does not lose its usefulness before the new calendars arrive in January and need not be wrapped in a bright package or adorned with ribbons and bows.
There are those who will note that my Scotch-Irish thrift is showing through. But it is more than that. When it comes to selecting gifts for youngsters, my choice of the finest gift of all would be one everlastingly useful and not antiquated or broken before the next Christmas arrives.
I have touched on this theme previously, and those constant companions with this corner of the page perhaps suspect that the perfect gift of which I speak is a “sense of wonder.”
This most perfect gift is the immeasurable quality to find something new and exciting in the diminishing domicile we call nature, or what the new cadre of conversationalists call “our environment.”
It is that quality that makes even the rigors of winter a joy for youngsters.
By a sense of wonder, I do not imply that one should stagger around in a briar-patch with jaw jutting out and mouth agap in astonishment at what makes the thorns so sharp.
I would hope, simply, that they could see through the haze of man-made monotony and distinguish things that are eternally fresh and intellectually amazing.
It seems to me that a sense of wonder manifests itself in a youngster’s desire to suddenly “see” things at which they have been looking for years.
If they want to record with a photograph the hues of a rainbow, that is a sense of wonder. Or if they begin to comprehend the beauty of clouds, the freshness of a sunrise the ancient tranquility of a sunset the timeless miracle in the birth of a colt… now that is a “sense of wonder.”
Youngsters have a sense of wonder when they perceive the simple miracle of a plant popping up through the soil in spring; or of a small ant laboring to carry a breadcrumb to its nest; or the constant renewal of life itself which-like the seasons — weaves together the
necessities of birth, growth, regeneration and finally death.
Most youngsters have a bit of this sense of wonder to begin with, and it is responsible for a long line of puppies, minnows, crawfish, assorted bugs, birds and other of nature’s denizens that become transient residents of every youngster’s own private world at one time or another.
But it needs to be encouraged and expanded so that it is not discarded as they grow to maturity.
The ability to contemplate the mystery and miracle of even the smallest creature or the tallest mountain is the sense of wonder that can sustain them not just for now or next Christmas, but for a lifetime.
I would rather that my children, and their children, were blessed with a sense of wonder than to be rich and clever. Big cities are filled with rich and clever people who are bored to death with the monotony of an existence that is contrived and out of touch with reality.
They see, but they do not understand. They touch, but they cannot feel. They participate, but they do not experience. Sadly, they have lost that sense of wonder somewhere’ between childhood and adulthood.
The final realization that man cannot synthesize all the beauty of the colors in a rainbow, or artificially create the sparkle in a raindrop, or manufacture the delicate proportions of a snowflake, is the “sense of wonder” of which I speak. It is the greatest gift of all.
It cannot be purchased in a store; it cannot be wrapped in a package. And perhaps, it is a gift that can only be given by youngsters to those of us in the older generation who have had it and lost it somewhere along the way.
Our Back Yard — originally published on Dec. 7, 1983 — by Tom Warden.
