A Simple Christmas by Mike Huckabee Read Free Book Online Page B

represented. And I hope I don’t forget to think about the greatest sacrifice of all, God’s gift of Himself . . . a simple gift. After all, it was a simple Christmas.
    P.S. I’ll bet you’re wondering whatever happened to the guitar from J. C. Penney. After a few years, I wanted to upgrade to a better guitar and sold it to a gentleman named Norman Gilbey in my hometown of Hope, Arkansas, for fifty dollars. In 1998, thirty years later, Capitol Offense was playing at the annual Watermelon Festival in Hope. Norman was there and came up to me and said, “You remember the guitar you sold me?”
    â€œI sure do! Whatever happened to it? I later regretted selling it,” I remarked.
    â€œI still have it. It’s been sitting in a closet most of these years. I didn’t get to play it that much, so it’s still in good shape,” Norman revealed. He then asked if I’d like it back. I told him that he could name his price—I would love to have that first guitar back. He argued with me about payment and insisted that I just take it. I finally agreed, but on the condition that I would send him a collection of souvenirs from the governor’s office (non-taxpayer-funded, of course!). After thirty years, the little guitar from J. C. Penney was back home. When the Old State House Museum in Little Rock wanted personal items of governors for display, I loaned them the guitar, and if you are ever in Little Rock, you can stop by and see it. And as for the Gretsch Tennessean and Jazz Bass that I sold, after my kids were grown, I scoured Internet sites and looked in every music store and pawnshop I could find whenever I was in a new town to try to find guitars like those. Though I spent a lot more than I got for the originals, I now own a 1964 Gretsch Tennessean (even more valuable than the one I had) and had Fender build a Jazz Bass exactly like the one I had when I was a teenager. They sit side by side next to my desk now, and seeing them makes me feel seventeen all over again. Then I stand up and realize I’m not seventeen again!

3.
    Loneliness
    I never knew my grandfather on my mother’s side of the family. From what sparse descriptions I had of him from my mother, it sounded like it was just as well. She didn’t talk about him much, and when she did, it was not with affection, but rather with a level of contempt that probably hid a lot of stuff I didn’t need to know. She did tell me that he was an alcoholic and that he could often be harsh, even abusive. But in general, my mother buried her memories of her father deep within her soul and never, to my knowledge, talked about them to anyone. Her generation didn’t have Oprah or Dr. Phil leading people to bare their souls and openly express all their inner feelings and emotions to the world. From what I gather, my grandfather’s story would have been more fitting for Jerry Springer than Oprah anyway.
    My grandfather was born in 1868 and died in 1945—ten years before I was born. He served in the military during the Spanish-American War but was too old to fight in World War I. He had been married once before he married my grandmother and was almost sixty when my mother was born. He was considerably older than my grandmother but managed to father seven children with her. My mother was the oldest and therefore had the most memories of him—memories, it seems, she would later try to forget. In my grandfather’s first marriage, he had fathered two sons, both of whom were easily old enough to be my mother’s father. One of these two half brothers of hers, Garvin Elder, was the closest thing to an actual father figure she had.
    To my sister and me, he was “Uncle Garvin.” He was a lifelong bachelor who lived by himself in Houston, Texas. He had spent most of his career as an accountant for Armour Meat Company, and I suppose because he lived very frugally and never married or had kids, he kept most of