Like you, if you were lucky enough to have the perfect childhood, my young years looped around that one magical day. The days leading up to it were loaded with wonder and on the very morning of Christas Day an explosion of dreams come true.
But child time is short time and the day after came with thoughts of the eternity that existed before that day would roll around again.
Yet on the Christmas morning of 1960 my view was forever altered when I saw real magic.
Everything was as my years had come to expect: the glittering tinseled tree stretched to the ceiling, the felt, sequined Mr. and Mrs. Clause our grandfather had made hanging on the wall, the fireplace already aglow, and Mom and Dad in their robes holding cups of coffee. What was different was what was under the tree. The number and size of the packages did not fit under the boughs, and instead flushed out all about.
My eyes went big and wide at the wonder of it, unknowing that the biggest, best, most valuable lifelong gift I was about to receive wasn’t under the tree at all.
As always, I tore into the packages marked for me, and those marked from Santa or Mom and Dad were their normal great.
What blew me away and affected me more than any wrapped package was this: the most perfectly wrapped gifts, often the most expensive gifts, were all marked “From Billy,” my 16-year-old, oldest brother.
Turns out he hadn’t spent all that money from his double newspaper route on himself. He spent it on us.
I would spend the next 65 years lighting up others just the way he lit me up that one Christmas morning when I was 11 years old.
I would never again receive a gift that beat my heart as hard as my giving one.
My brother did that for me when I was very young, and his giving had no end. Later he would do it for his own kids, and much later he did it again for me, when he dragged himself out of bed in the middle of the night just to hand me a seat in my first political job as an Arizona State Senator.
Richard Kimball
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