Editorial:

With this being our last issue before Christmas, this year the message will be of a more personal nature about the one Christmas I will never forget.

It was over 20 years ago while working with my dad at the newspaper. We had finally gotten to the point where I was able to draw a salary and was finally able to afford rent. No more roommates!

I got lucky and found an apartment on Sixth Ave across the street from the park and close to the office. It was a cute 2-story building with pink bricks and the rent was cheap. The apartments just oozed character. On one side there towered a condo complex, on the other, an empty lot.

It was an eclectic group of neighbors. There was the young intern. She was focused on becoming a doctor. Next door was a gay male, but you wouldn’t have known it by looking, or by talking with him. On the other side was another gay couple, they were the opposite, they were loud and over the top. One of their favorite things to do was to dress alike when they went out. One was a Hispanic and his mother would come to visit once a month. The couple would tone it down a bit whenever she was around. She was a nice lady who loved her son.

There was the lesbian couple down below me who didn’t socialize much. There was the older woman who lived in the front apartment, it was the largest of all the apartments, but she never came out of the apartment. I never saw her the whole time I lived there.

I would look out my bedroom window and across the street was the newly opened vegan restaurant that is still there. Next to that was Extraordinary Desserts. How great it was that I could just walk out my door and pop over for a great desert!

But the main attraction was across the street, Balboa Park! The parades, the festivals, and just the daily parade of people at the park to entertain you. Every warm Sunday morning I would take the fold out chair, the Sunday morning paper, and a cup of coffee to the park. I would enjoy the morning with the folks doing yoga, others doing that slow motion Chinese workout, the joggers, the walkers, many with their dogs, and the children at the playground. It was a great place to live.

One Christmas season as I looked out my bedroom window onto the empty lot, I started noticing a small Toyota truck, with a shell on the back, parking right under my window each night. It was a family of four with two young girls, maybe 4 and 7. They would all sleep in the back of the truck. Each morning they would drive off, only to come back at night.

As Christmas day creep closer, I started feeling sorry for the girls… they wouldn’t be able to enjoy Christmas. No Christmas tree, no holiday lights, and worst of all no presents to open. No Santa Claus!!! It would just be another day of waking up in the back of a pick-up truck.

I didn’t make a lot of money, just enough to get by. I didn’t have a lot of extra cash but what I did have I used to start buying little gifts that I thought a couple of young girls would like. Not a lot of presents, I don’t remember how many, maybe eight total, four for each girl: dolls, teddy bears, things like that. I guess I wanted to give them something to believe in. I wanted to give them the opportunity to believe in the joy of Christmas. I wanted, for one day, to push the harsh reality that they lived in to the side and give them the opportunity to believe in Santa Claus.

The only thing that would have ruined it would have been if they didn’t show up on Christmas Eve. But they did, like clockwork.

My plan was to get up really early in the morning and put the presents on the hood of the car. It was freezing cold that morning as I put out the presents. I went back to bed and waited. In my head I wanted to see the girls come out of the truck and find the presents as they jumped with glee telling their parents that Santa came!

It didn’t happen that way. The father was the first one up. He found the presents and collected them and took them back into the truck. I have no idea what he thought, or what he told the kids. All I know was that I was glad, more than glad, that those girls had something for Christmas. It felt good.

They drove off that morning and never came back.

When my children ask me what I want for Christmas I tell them to take that money they would have spent buying me a present and give it to a homeless person. And they always say, with a sigh, you tell us that every year! I wish there was a way I could share with them how good it would make them feel to make a stranger happy. But that is something they will have to find out for themselves.

Now we give at church. We have an Angel tree where we pick a star and buy the present listed on the star for a boy or girl whose parent is in prison. We give an extra donation for the homeless. We buy extra food at the grocery store and take it church where they distribute it at the homeless shelter. We do that and more, but it just isn’t the same as it was that one Christmas a long time ago.

Merry Christmas! Feliz Navidad!
Daniel Munoz, Jr.
Editor