Happy Birthday Wonderful Saviour!! - Hazel Johnson

A Merry and blessed Christmas to everyone; I hope your spirits are on fire with love, and that you have some of your family and friends with you this day!!

If you do not, remember we are still 'incredibly blessed' on this the most wonderful day in human history!!

I would just like to share with you some of my Christmas memories of the past, and also part of a song that I wrote (to the tune of "Amazing Grace").

FOREVER YOURS

Verse One
You came to earth through Mary mild,
Her strength, her fears relieved,
By God’s own choice for motherhood,
Your tiny Son was born!


Chorus
Forever yours, your blood was shed,
For each and every one.
How precious was that gift from God,
The night that you were born!


Verse Two
Baptized by John in river Jordan,
Led by Spirit forty days.
When it was time, you heard His call,
Became our only Saviour.


Chorus
Forever yours, your blood was shed,
For each and every one.
How precious was that gift from God,
The night that you were born!

When I was a teenager every month of December, there were hundreds of freshly cut Christmas trees in our backyard!

My parents were the original founders of a wonderful organization for young boys and girls in Southern Alberta called the Junior Forest Wardens. Our yard was transformed and filled to the brim with trees to sell for their organization.

It meant every supper meal was interrupted several times, when one of the four of us in my family very happily would get up from the table and go outside (usually 20 or 30 below), and sell a Xmas tree to an individual or a family. The very best part of it was seeing the smiles and delight on little faces!!

I know that it certainly made my Christmases very happy, and I was grateful to God.

The funny part of it was that despite all those trees outside in our backyard, every year my Mom would instead go into the forest nearby (and with the forest warden’s permission), we would cut down our family tree for that Christmas. She always picked the ugliest, barest, scrawniest, saddest-looking tree that she could find!!

I think this spoke volumes about her loving character!! And even when I grew up, left home, and then got married – every Christmas Eve that CHARLIE BROWN Xmas tree looked absolutely radiant!!!!

Adorned with antique ornaments, and those old-fashioned icicle lights, and underneath its trunk were always a dozen or more little inexpensive gifts to me from: “the dirty dish-rag owner”, the “milk man”, the “tooth fairy”, “Santa’s elf #2”, “Rudolph”, etc., etc.!

God bless everyone this day, and every day in 2012!