I never knew my great uncle, Robert Keith Leavitt. He was my paternal grandfather's only full sibling, but he died the same year as I was born. Before his death, Uncle Bob has been a writer, although not someone you would have heard of, and that's fine. He wrote corporate histories with exciting titles like Prologue to Tomorrow: A History of the First Hundred Years in the Life of the Pennsylvania Salt Manufacturing Company and Foundation for the Future: History of the Stanley Works. I confess that I have not taken the time to read any of them.

He also was an avid member of the Baker Street Irregulars writing detailed monographs dissecting and analyzing Sherlock Holmes' adventures with an eye for detail that would have done him well on the Internet. He was an ur-geek, so I feel some camaraderie.

Unlike yours truly, Uncle Bob was a skilled writer, whether by natural ability, osmosis from constant immersion in Doyle, or his years in advertising. No doubt all were factors. His writing was at its most sincere in his remembrances of his childhood in New England, including his book The Chip on Grandma's Shoulder.

My elder sister recently showed me one of these remembrances in the form of a short story called "The Christmas Miracle." I post it here in its entirety. I probably should call my cousin Bill Leavitt to get permission and perhaps I will. In any case, it was already on the Internet in another form, so I don't feel too bad about posting it here.

On the morning before the Christmas that fell when I was six, My father took my brother and me for a walk in the woods on the Old Colony town where we lived. Three times as we walked he stopped, and cut a small balsam tree. There was a very tiny one, hardly more than a seedling; a small one foot or so high; and a youthful one of perhaps four feet. So we each had a tree to bear; flaglike, back to the house. It didn’t occur to us single-minded larvae that this had the least connection with Christmas. Our father was a botanist Ph.D., given to plucking all manner of specimens whenever we walked, with the offhand explanation, A fine Tsuga canadensis, or whatever it was. By nightfall we had forgotten all about the walk.

For this was Christmas Eve, and we were suddenly in a panic. Where was The Tree? On experience, we knew that it was usually delivered in the morning, that Father set it up in the afternoon and that Mother trimmed it at night, letting us help with the ornaments before she put us to bed in a fever of anticipation. But this year we had seen no tree arrive; look where we would, we could not find one; and even Mother turned aside our questions. Would there be no Tree? Would there, perhaps, be no Christmas at all for us? How we wished now, that we had not put the cat in the milk-pail!

But after supper Father and Mother took us into the sitting-room. In a cleared corner over by the big closet stood a jar of earth. Christmas, said Father is a day of miracles, to remind us of the greatest Miracle of all. Perhaps we shall see one. Then Mother led us out, closing the door on Father and the jar of earth—and the closet.

We can help, she said, by learning this song. And she began, softly but very true, O Little Town of Bethlehem. We tried hard in our shrill way. But even Mother had to admit it was only a good try. Yet when the door opened and we went again into the sitting-room, behold! A tiny Tree had appeared in the jar of earth! Hardly more than a seeding, to be sure, and not old enough yet to bear ornaments, but indubitably a Tree. Marveling, we went out again.

This time we did better—on the words, if not the tune. And when we re-entered the sitting-room, the Tree had grown—to perhaps a foot or so in height! A blaze of hope flashed upon us. We went out and tried harder on that song. And sure enough, this time the Tree was taller than either boy. Terrific! We could hardly wait to get outside and sing some more with Mother, For now hope was a rapture of certainty.

To this day I cannot hear O Little Town of Bethlehem, from however cracked a curbside organ, without hearing through and beyond it the clear true voice of my mother. Nor hear that long-vanished sweetness without knowing that presently somewhere, somehow a great door is going to open and disclose unearthly beauty. It is more than sixty years since our sitting-room door swung back for the fourth time, that night in the Old Colony of Massachusetts. But I can still see, sharp as life, the splendor of the Tree that towered to the ceiling in its glossy dark green, sparkling with silver tinsel, glowing with candles and half hiding in its crisp, fragrant needles, the incomparable perfection of spheres that shone like far-off other worlds, red and blue and green and gold…

Cynics say that miracles are all man-made—contrived, like a Christmas tree hidden in a closet and flashed upon wondering kids. That even the Christmas spirit is only a spell we work up to bemuse one another—and then fall for, ourselves like so many simple children. What of it? So much the better! If mankind, by its own devoted labor, can induce it itself—if only for a day—an all-pervading spirit of friendship and cheer and good will and loving kindness, that alone is a very great miracle. It is the kind of miracle that must please above all others Him who know how miracles are wrought.

I found this story painfully apropos this year as I lost my mother just four months ago. Although he never mentions it in the story, the Christmas Uncle Bob recalls was to be his last with his mother who would die of pneumonia the following year.