For research into his Christmas Eve message, our pastor asked the congregation to post him with a description of the best Christmas gifts we had received. Well, aside from the best Gift of the Christ child, of course! This was my post to him:

I’m going to call it the “best gift” for a couple of reasons; First, I still have it. After 43 years or so. Even though it no longer works. It is in my jewelry box for sentimental reasons. Second, it is one of the most unique gifts I ever received from a giver who means the world to me. The gift? A pocket watch. Yes, an old-timey pocket watch, a Bulova, to be specific. It isn’t one of those thick railroad conductor watches. It is sleek, thin, and modern; gold plated and etched on the outside in a fine crosshatch pattern.

I’ll save you the trouble of rolling your eyes about the usefulness of a pocket watch, to say that as a young guy (22 years old when I received it) I actually used it as my daily timepiece for the better part of 30+ years. It was most often connected by a gold plated chain to my belt loop. I did not wear a wristwatch.

Why is it the best? Well, for that explanation, I’ll refer you to the inscription on the inside of the watch, which was presented to me by my bride of only months at the time. It reads

“Our First Christmas, 2-17-78”

Yes, I have the same Gregorian calendar used by most of the world. And Christmas on that calendar is on December 25 each year. But the year Debbie and I were married, 1977, only three months into our marriage, she was in a serious car accident on the first day of winter, December 21. The car, a sporty and solid Pontiac Firebird she was driving, was totaled when she spun out on black ice on her way to work from our second-floor apartment in Troy to Crittenton Hospital in Rochester where she was a physical therapist. She side slammed a telephone pole and had to be extracted from the car by the infamous “Jaws of Life.”

The call I received while at work in Detroit from, yes, Crittenton Hospital, where she was taken by ambulance suggested calmly that I come to the hospital because my wife was “a little bruised” from a car accident that morning. It was the day I learned what euphemisms are.

Upon arriving at the hospital, I discovered that her hip had been shattered and that she was going to be laid up for quite a while, recovering. No, Mr. Alexander, she would not be able to walk for some time while she recovered, and, yes, she would need physical therapy herself. And, we’ll need to keep her here in the hospital for at least a week or more. We hope that it will not affect her gait permanently. But, time will tell.

So, several days later, our actual first Christmas night was spent at her bedside in the hospital where she, her parents, and I toasted to a better new year. And I retired back to our one-flight-up first-Christmas-decorated Troy apartment, stepping through the door that only three months earlier I had carried her, my new bride. It was a door she would not be able to enter again for months.

When she was discharged from the hospital, we holed up with her hospitable parents who lived on a one-floor ranch home in Waterford. I regularly returned to the apartment to dust or grab a new set of clothes or just check to make sure everything was still in place. Debbie and I had resolved to postpone our Christmas. We did not exchange gifts until nearly two months later on, yes, Saturday, February 17, when, using a cane, she told me she was ready to slowly and carefully climb the single and long flight of steps up to our apartment.

We were going there to celebrate our first Christmas at last, so when she stepped through the door, she saw that in all the trips I had made to the apartment, I had not undecorated it one bit. It was lit in its newlywed Christmas glory. Unfortunately, I had also not watered the tree which stood hard and spiny in the middle of the living room. Nor did I water the poinsettias, whose leaves had dried to paper-thin whisps as brown as ancient newsprint. But the lights and our hearts were bright and glorious as we settled on the couch to finally exchange gifts and celebrate in real-time what the calendar said was long past over.

I know there were other gifts she gave me, but the only gift I remember receiving from my beautiful bride was the pocket watch. An exorbitant expense for a newlywed couple. But it was and is beautiful and I cherish it even today, although it does not keep time. What it keeps, is a memory.