This time last year I shared with you the story from one of my favorite Christmas books, A Cup of Christmas Tea by Tom Hegg. I received such a favorable response to it that I am sharing it again. If you enjoy tea or just have a warm spot in your heart for Christmas, you can’t help but be moved by this lovely story written in verse.

The narrator (we’ll call him Tom) is feeling very satisfied with himself that all the cards are written and all the presents are bought and wrapped. Still, there’s a little nagging guilt that just won’t go away.

The week before, he received a letter from his great aunt who had suffered a mild stroke which crippled one side of her body and left her housebound. The aunt invites Tom to come for a chat and a cup of Christmas tea. She adds, however, that she will understand if he can’t.

Tom does not want to go. He feels it would be just too much for him to see a once vigorous, funny, and bright aunt now hardly able to get around. He doesn’t want the pain. Why can’t his brother go? Soon his reasons not to go begin to crack “.. .wide and crumbling in an acid rain of guilt .”

Dressed for the cold weather, he drives to the wooden house in the older part of town. On the porch he rings the door bell and waits nervously for the door to open. Just as he is about to turn to go he hears “... the rattle of the china hutch against the wall. The triple beat of two feet and a crutch came down the hall .”

The door opens and there stands his old great aunt “... pale and tiny, looking fragile as an egg .” Laughing, she grabs him by the hand and leads him inside.

What he finds are the sights and scents of “... Christmas past...alive...intact .” The smells of candied oranges, cinnamon, and pine. Homemade cookies. Ornaments of calico and glass. Wooden soldiers. The porcelain nativity. He was a boy of six again. And in a special place of honor among the old Christmas cards are the ones he and his brother had made as kids.

Tom and his aunt sit down and he struggles to make small talk. She listens patiently, then smiles and asks, “What’s new?’

These two words cause Tom to lose his “... phony breeziness ...” and he begins to truly share what has been going on in his life. His aunt has an amazingly positive attitude and is passionately interested in everything he is doing. Specifics for her, please, no generalities. After a while, she goes to make them a cup of tea.

“ I sat alone with feelings that I hadn’t felt in years.

I looked around at Christmas through a thick, hot blur of tears.

And the candles and the holly she’d arranged on every shelf...

The impossibly good cookies she still somehow baked herself...

But these rich, tactile memories became quite pale and thin

When measured by the Christmas my Great Aunt kept deep within.

Her body halved and nearly spent, but my Great Aunt was whole.

I saw a Christmas miracle...the triumph of the soul.

The triple beat of two feet and a crutch came down the hall.

The rattle of the china in the hutch against the wall.

She poured two cups. She smiled, and then she handed one to me,

And then, we settled back and had a cup of Christmas tea.”

A very merry Christmas to you and yours.