Editor's Letter

Ralphie Parker lobbied hard for the best Christmas gift he ever received. “I want an official Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock.”

I was never hung up on just one thing at Christmas. And I can’t remember asking for a bike. But it was a great gift — a street machine built for popping wheelies. It had three speeds, a sissy bar and a banana seat, and it was the color of a lemon-lime Mr. Misty. Phosphorescent green, that’s how it looked. Yet I never saw it.

Like Ralphie’s Red Ryder, it was hiding to the left of the tree. I’m not sure how my parents pulled that off. In the German tradition, we opened Christmas gifts on Christmas Eve. So the bike would have been rolled in during the day. Probably by my mother, who might have done it while I was out chopping wood with my father and brothers. That was a Christmas Eve tradition in our family. We’d work for hours in the deep snow, our soaking-wet gloves turning to ice. It was cold. There must have been some kind of lesson in that. I don’t know. But I do know that once the last piece of firewood was tossed on the trailer, my father would pour each of us a small glass of Manischewitz — Concord grape. Never mind that we weren’t old enough to drink. It’s a good memory. I have many.

Growing up, I was fortunate to find gifts under the tree. Not everyone did, including thousands of Navajo children in the post-Depression. They did, however, have a guardian angel. A man who embodied the spirit of the season and gathered gifts for the kids, even if they didn’t know what Christmas was all about.

His name was Hugh Dickson Smith, a Presbyterian missionary, but to the Navajo people he was known as “Shine” — “He brings hope and life like the sun shining upon the earth,” they said. We first featured Mr. Smith in our August 1946 issue. “The Navajos have never had a better friend,” Gladwell Richardson wrote. “Or a more important one. His church is the grandest and most encompassing in all the world — 25,000 square miles of Northern Arizona. A vast region in which each man, woman and, especially, child knows him.”

Mr. Smith held his first Christmas party for the Navajo people in 1938. By the time we started promoting it a decade later, it was drawing hundreds of people, but donations were lagging. That’s when Raymond Carlson, our longtime editor, used his pulpit to make a plea. “Food and clothing are needed,” he wrote in October 1948. “A can of coffee, or peaches, would be a fine gift, or candy. Old clothing, even old shoes, are valuable contributions. We know of one little Navajo boy who received a heavy coat at Shine’s party. He has insisted on wearing it ever since. Gifts need not be large or expensive. Small monetary gifts sent to Shine will be used for medicine and needed supplies. Fruit, sent before Christmas, would be very welcome. Navajo children like oranges, but very seldom get any.”

Like George Bailey’s friends emptying their pockets in his living room, donations rolled in. And so did a storm.

On December 18, 1948, the day before the party, several inches of snow fell on the Shonto Trading Post, but it wasn’t enough to keep the families away. “They came in wagons, on horses and burros, some in trucks and some on foot, from near and distant places,” Mr. Carlson wrote. “Word had gone out that Shine was to have the best party yet. It was. In the snow-covered world that was Shonto, the Navajos in their colorful dress were bright patches on a white landscape. It was Christmas weather and a festive Christmas spirit prevailed.”

Today, those kids would be in their late 70s and early 80s. I’d like to think they have fond memories of those parties, and of Mr. Smith, who died just before Christmas in 1966. His time was a simpler time. A time when Reuben and Mildred Heflin would spend hours cooking up a lamb stew for the party — “it was real good stew.”

Most of us have some degree of sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, and a need to cling to the memories of a simpler time: of banana seats, sissy bars and Manischewitz. Well, banana seats and sissy bars.

“We didn’t realize we were making memories,” Milne said, “we just knew we were having fun.”

Having fun. It isn’t always easy. We live in a world where civility and kindness are compromised, and people seem to have forgotten the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. There’s wisdom in that. But Jeannette Maré, the founder of a remarkable nonprofit called Ben’s Bells, which is dedicated to promoting kindness, says there’s a higher aspiration. She calls it the Platinum Rule: Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.

Shine Smith understood that. And every one of us can strive for that. ’Tis the season. Meantime, whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa … or just some quiet time alone, we wish you joy, and thank you for spending another year with Arizona Highways.