Editors' Note: The following is an excerpt from Sharing Christmas: Stories for the Season. This heartwarming collection of stories and beautiful vintage illustrations offers many of the best Christmas tales ever told-- from stories of the first Christmas to classic favorites and true stories of Christmases past and present. Anecdotes of love, caring, and giving are told by authors such as Gordon B. Hinckley, Gene R. Cook, George Durrant, Emily Watts, Ann Edwards Cannon, Marilyn Arnold, Lael Littke, and Richard Siddoway. Brimming with the joy and anticipation of Christmas, this collection has stories you will want to read around your dinner table this season.
I was fourteen and I wanted to die.
Part of the problem was that I was fourteen and female. My brother John, the doctor, says that being fourteen and female is a disorder actually recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, and that his professor once spent a whole day talking about it in his Introduction to Psychiatry class. Physical symptoms of the fourteen-and-female syndrome include slumping in chairs, standing with arms folded across the chest, and wearing the exact same clothes as other disturbed fourteen-year-old girls. Behavioral symptoms include crying, trying on lip gloss, crying, going to the mall, crying, talking to disturbed fourteen-year-old boys on the telephone—and crying.
It's a terrible disease, and so far there's no cure.
So being fourteen was definitely part of my problem. The other part was that I was supposed to be the featured Youth Participant in the ward Christmas program that Sunday. It wouldn't have been so bad if I had just been allowed to get up and deliver the standard Youth Talk, which runs something along these lines: “Today I'm going to talk about (fill in the blank). Webster's Dictionary defines (fill in the blank) as (fill in a couple more blanks). I hope that we can all (blank, blank, blank).” And so forth.
Well, I wasn't going to be allowed to give a Youth Talk. I had to participate with a bunch of adults in a special holiday program written and directed by Dr. LaVerl S. Wanship, professor of music.
Dr. Wanship was a roly-poly little man who could play the piano like nobody's business. In fact, he could play the piano so well that sometimes he would stop in the middle of bearing his testimony and say, “Why don't I just play my testimony for you?” Then he would stride up to the front of the chapel on his little legs, position himself in front of the piano, pause—and play. Whenever Dr. Wanship did this, I and the rest of the fourteen-year-olds in the ward would cringe. It was so embarrassing.
Actually, Dr. Wanship wasn't the only adult in our ward who did embarrassing things. There was Sister Miller, who wore white go-go boots even though she was seventy years old, and Brother Meacham, who sprayed spit every time he talked, and Sister Fisher, who loudly told everybody at a ward party that all it took to keep regular was a cup of bran and a glass of warm water every morning.
Even my own parents were embarrassing. Although they were always late to sacrament meeting, they breezed through the door at the front of the chapel and headed straight for the family pew instead of sitting circumspectly in the cultural hall stealing Cheerios from babies with the rest of the stragglers. “You guys never come on time,” a friend once whispered to me. “And why does your mother wear those black sunglasses in church, anyway?”
It was true. My mother, after arriving late, proceeded to sit through church meetings looking like Jacqueline Onassis avoiding the press at the airport. It didn't matter that she was the most terrific-looking mother in the whole ward, not to mention the universe—I still wanted to slip like so much loose change through the cracks of a sofa.
And now I was supposed to do something embarrassing, too.
Dr. Wanship called a practice the Saturday before the program so we could rehearse our parts. We met in the chapel and took turns reading our parts from the podium while Dr. Wanship sat on the front pew and flapped directions at us.
“It's your turn, Sister Edwards.”
I schlepped over to the microphone like any self-respecting fourteen-year-old girl, plopped open my mostly unused Bible, and began to mumble.
“I am the light of the—”
Dr. Wanship leaped like a toad. “NO! NO! NO! Listen to the words you're saying.” He placed his hands over his heart. “Feel the words you are saying.”
I stared at Dr. Wanship. Putting too much Dippity-Do in my bangs was something to get worked up about. Reading scriptures wasn't.
“Try again.”
I did. He flew at me again. And again and again.
“He wants me to make a total fool of myself,” I wailed to my father that night.
My father looked like Job would have looked if the Lord had sent him a fourteen-year-old daughter along with the rest of the plagues. “Just do the best you can,” he said patiently.
So the next afternoon I stood before the congregation, tossed my hair, and routinely read the words,
“I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” (John 8:12.)
When I sat down, I saw a look of profound disappointment cloud Dr. Wanship's round little face.
Well, Dr. Wanship, that was more than twenty years ago, and it has taken me that long to understand why those words once made the night glad. So I want to apologize for letting you down and to tell you that I would try to read those words for you now the way you hoped I would then. I would make those glorious words ring from the chapel walls. I would make them crack stone.
Merry Christmas, Dr. Wanship.
