A Simple Christmas by Mike Huckabee Page B

phone to call to see if he really wanted his son to pick up a Playboy . The only future in that exchange would be an old-fashioned “whipping” with a belt or, even worse, one of the hideous green tree branches affectionately known as switches. I’m sure I’m offending the sensibilities of those who think corporal punishment a form of barbarism, but it never occurred to me at the time to think of myself as being abused. I was simply experiencing my early indoctrination into my father’s form of patriotism—true patriotism—he laid on the stripes and I saw stars.
    After we walked to Jack’s so my uncle could pick up a copy of the New York Times , Houston Post , or Shreveport Times to check the stock market and get the news, we’d walk back home and sometimes stop at Joe’s City Bakery for a chocolate-covered doughnut. On the way back, since the fire station where my dad worked was only two blocks from our house, we’d usually stop there to see him if he was working that day. On afternoon walks, we sometimes walked the eight or ten blocks to the local Dairy Queen, which meant a soft-serve ice cream cone.
    It was fun walking with Uncle Garvin because he didn’t poke around. His walks were brisk, and walking around Hope with a man all dressed up in a suit and, usually, a light tan fedora made us feel like real big shots. He even wore what we called old man socks, which were actually midcalf silk stockings, but since all we knew were white cotton socks (even with jackets and ties), even those seemed pretty upscale.
    The visits with Uncle Garvin were some of our favorite times of the year, but they weren’t without some moments of frustration. He was more predictable than the Cubs losing to the Cardinals, and because he was an eccentric and lifelong bachelor, he was used to having things his way and on his own terms. He wanted his meals prepared so specifically that one would have thought he was ordering from the menu at the Four Seasons, and we always watched what he wanted to watch on TV, which meant that during his visits, Popeye cartoons and The Three Stooges had to give way to The Edge of Night , the evening news, and the aforementioned Perry Mason . Years later, as an adult, my wife and I would come to love watching Perry Mason reruns late at night, but I confess that it took me a while to get over my loathing of the show that I had been force-fed by Uncle Garvin when I would have rather been watching The Little Rascals .
    It seemed that the regular visits from Uncle Garvin would always be a part of our lives, especially at Christmas. We always looked forward to Uncle Garvin’s Christmas visits most because they were the longest and my sister and I were out of school and had more time to be home. Plus, Uncle Garvin would always give us a five-dollar bill as a gift, which for us was a lot of cold cash to have, since back then a movie ticket only cost twenty-five cents and a hamburger at Dad’s Hamburger Stand only cost a dime.
    Uncle Garvin was as much a part of Christmas for us as the tree and the ornaments. That is, until the Christmas of 1967.
    In the fall of 1967, I noticed that my mother and dad had several phone calls with Uncle Garvin. That was unusual because in those days most of the communication between Uncle Garvin and my mother was through typed letters, his typed on old-fashioned tissue-thin typing paper on an old Underwood Five machine, and my mother’s also banged out on an Underwood with a hand-operated carriage return and a little bell that rang at the end of a line of type. Long-distance phone calls were rare at my house and were done by dialing zero on the phone and telling the operator, “I’d like to make a long-distance call ,” which sounded about as important as launching a satellite into orbit. Receiving a long-distance call was just as big a deal, and whoever answered the phone would run about the house shouting, “Long