It just a brown bag.

There is a little church beside the road in a valley in rural Southern Indiana. My great, great, great grandfather donated the land it is built on it. The Sunday before Christmas my cousin dresses up like Santa and hands out gifts to the little kids. After that, everyone gets a small brown treat bag. It is just a brown paper bag. The treat are modest. It is a candy bar, some gum, an orange, a candy cane, and a few handfuls of peanuts. The bag has a particular smell. The peanuts are the biggest smell but it is painted with a touch of orange and peppermint. It seemed, somehow, that the treat bag was preferable to me instead of a present. I always love the smell of it. If you asked me in the middle of June, and I was too stupid to tell you my name, I could tell you what that bag smells like.

I asked my father several years ago where the bag came from and he told the story not so easily. Dad was of a generation older than most of my friend's parents. He grew up during the tail end of the Depression. In that little valley the families were pretty close. There were essentially two kinds of families. There were farm families and families that had parents that worked in at the chair mill in town. During the Depression the chair mill slowly folded. Though no one was wealthy by any means, the farm families were far better off having access to more food and cash traded for surpluses. Lots of folks were having a hard time getting by. Lots of kids were not going to have anything nice for Christmas. When things took an ugly turn during the 1937 dip, the chair mill sold to a company in Bloomington and shut the doors. The church, in an effort to give something to those who were looking at rough times, decided it had to do something. Those that had a little bit sold some milk, eggs, pork and honey and pooled the cash, buying a small barrel of peanuts, a crate of oranges (a delicacy in those parts in that time as there were plenty of apples but citrus couldn't survive the frost), a box of chewing gum, and some candy bars. In those days it was Hersheys and Baby Ruths now it is Hersheys, Snickers, or 3 Musketeers. They put them in bags and put them under the tree.

For a lot of folks then and later during the war years, it was the best they got during the holidays. Dad loved those little bags. If we didn't eat their contents fast enough or hide them he would steal our peanuts. He and I would get home from church and pull two chairs together and put a trashcan between us and murder those peanuts. Now it is just me left with that memory. Like any song with that kind of father I weep like a fool as I write the story out. Dad would get emotional when he told stories about that time, when movies picture it, when books talked about it. He once told me, "I can only hope you will never see the kind of despair so many people wore on their faces out in the open.". He loved his friends that were from the valley and that time. They were a symbol, to him, that the valley had survived. The little brown bags were a symbol that the little church beside the road was a nexus of a community of good people and that it would not let its people suffer needlessly or alone.

My God, we have so much. Look at this machine I type on. Look at the clothes on my back. My family is not wealthy. Many people could call us poor if they were so inclined to only look as far as our material position. Our lives are so RICH. SO SECURE. There were moments when I saw tears form in my father's eyes while he contemplated the distances we have traveled as a country. My dad loved these little brown bags SO MUCH. There are people who could look at them and scoff, viewing their meager contents as little more than a modest distraction. What can I do to help these people understand a greater value?