The More We Give

In the matter of your Christmas traditions, here’s an arrangement you may be familiar with. Every year, the parents of three grown children would divide their Christmases among their children’s families. But with the difficulties involved in holiday preparation and extensive travel, sometimes they were tempted to throw up their hands and say, “It’s too much! It’s just not worth the effort.” And whenever either of them would get that feeling of exasperation, they’d give the other a wink and say, “Long walk, dear, long walk,” and then laugh and get back to work.

You see, “Long walk” was one of their code signals. They began using it years earlier after reading a story about a young Pacific Islander who gave his missionary teacher an exquisite seashell as a Christmas gift. As the story goes, the boy had walked miles to locate the shell, to a special bay, the only place where such treasures were found. “How wonderful of you to have traveled so far…