A Health Tip From My Favorite Christmas

Dear Reader,

My warmest holiday wishes to you and yours on this Christmas Day!

It’s an occasion for remembrance, so let’s take a brief trip back to 1961.

My father, mother, older sister, and I lived in a little ranch house in Gresham, a suburb of Portland, Oregon. I was 6 years old.

Dad was a social worker, and at the start of his career to boot, so finances were tight.

We had a guest on that Christmas Day. Mark, my father’s cousin, was in the Army and was with us, he said, because a travel snafu had stranded him in Portland on Christmas rather than being at his family home in rural eastern Oregon.

Mark was a big, strapping kid, probably about 19, friendly and outgoing as most people tended to be back then, and apologetic about imposing on us. My parents assured him he was quite welcome. But since we had not planned to have him in our house, we had no present for him.

So my mother held a backroom confab with my father, sister, and me.

“Mark has no present, so we must make him one.”

With that, we scurried to our respective rooms.

Later that morning, after we had opened our modest collection of presents, my mother said casually to Mark, “Why, look, there’s one for you!”

Mark was clearly surprised and opened the package.

I don’t recall everything we put into his box, but I do remember that there was a homemade popcorn ball, an orange, some books, and some of my plastic green Army men — considering that Mark was in the Army, it seemed the best thing I could contribute.

Mark looked at it all for perhaps 10 seconds.

Then he began to cry.

Again, this was 54 years ago, yet I recall it quite vividly. I had never seen a man cry before.

I think I cried, too. Perhaps we all did.

I don’t know the whole story behind Mark’s tears — perhaps he was alone on Christmas for reasons that were deeper than the alleged mix-up in travel plans.

In any case, those tears were clearly expressions of deep appreciation for the sentiment represented by this odd little present. My father had quite few cousins and didn’t even know Mark especially well, but in those days — in our family, anyway — it was simply inconceivable that a family member would be excluded from any part of the full Christmas ritual, including the opening of presents.

More than half a century later, it is my deepest hope that, in this age of social fragmentation and isolation, you find yourself on this day with at least one person to whom you can express your love, and who can express it to you in return.

“It is in the shelter of each other that people live,” says the Irish proverb. As I’ve written before, our need to shelter, and be sheltered by, real, physical human beings, has not been obviated by social media or any other digital distraction.

It is a fundamental key — perhaps the key — to both physical and mental health.

If your home is full of people and life today, give thanks. And if this Christmas is a lonely one for you, make a resolution to lay the groundwork — in whatever way seems appropriate — for ensuring that the next one will not be.

There’s no health advice I can give you that’s more powerful than this.

And as the year draws to a close, let me express my deep appreciation for you, the readers of Natural Health Solutions. The knowledge, warmth, and appreciation you have expressed to me in 2015 have been a joy, and I look forward to us continuing this journey together!

Best,

Brad Lemley