A true Christmas story: The Wise Man's Four Gifts

This true personal story, which I wrote thirty years ago, was published by four magazines. It just seemed the right thing to share again with Christmas just a few days away. Maybe there’s someone to whom you can be that “farmer from Bickleton.”

Our wise man came not on a camel, but in a pickup.  His blue jeans bore stains of ranch work, and his thinning gray hair lay in disarray from the icy December wind. He brought three gifts: a 50-pound sack of potatoes from his farm, a quart of his locally famous home-canned sauerkraut, and a freshly killed turkey from his flock.

My sister’s family called this man their “farmer friend from Bickleton.”  They knew him through church.  They were surprised he’d heard about Dad, since very few people in my sister’s town knew him.  And they were even more surprised that he’d come thirty miles over snow-slick, hilly farmland roads just to say,” I hurt with you.”

 A few days before, while 2,000 miles away at graduate school, I got the shocking phone call telling of my dad’s fatal heart attack. It had been just six months since Mom died of cancer.  I wasn’t ready to hear such news again.  Now I was at my sister’s home in a town 200 miles from where our parents had lived.

There wasn’t much time to pause in the kitchen and gaze at the man’s gifts.  On the other side of the wall in my sister’s ma-and-pa style bookstore, customers waited impatiently at the cash register with their Christmas purchases.

“You’ve got to fix the turkey,” my sister said as she rushed out.  I balked.  It wasn’t that I didn’t know how.  I’d fixed my first turkey less than a month before when I helped a Norwegian student family celebrate their first American holiday. It was just that I was having trouble putting my heart into any kind of project.  But dutifully, I gathered ingredients for stuffing and located the roaster.

Outside, snowflakes spit over the gray, chilled parking lot.  People, with lots to do and much to shop for, hastened past.  For us, this Christmas meant a funeral and no more holidays with Mom and Dad.  But for others it would bring happy reunions and parties.  There would be gift-giving to carry on the tradition of the wise men, who gave the baby Jesus gold, frankincense, and myrrh—the king’s metal, a sacred incense, and embalming spice.

Three gifts.  Then I realized our wise man had really brought four gifts, one of which was greater than gold.  He could have stayed home, warm and uninvolved.  But he came, and though he said little, he offered much in offering himself.

The store apartment began filling with the aroma of his turkey, a fragrant offering of love and—in its own way—frankincense for a watching King.