My grandparents on my Dad's side grew up in a small town about 45 miles east of Little Rock, Arkansas called Hazen. It's a typical small southern town of about 1,600 people. People are friendly, no matter where you meet them. The pace of life is slow. And everybody seems to have time to stop for conversation.
The downtown area has a set of train tracks running through middle of it, which is sort of a reminder of the way things used. The last time I visited, Hazen had a great cafe on the edge of town that served food home style. And farming is a way of life for most people there. So is fishing and hunting.
Those are thing things I remember from my childhood when my grandparents took my sister and I there to visit during the summer. After we grew up, and after my grandfather died, my grandmother kept in touch with the town by reading their weekly newspaper called "The Grand Prairie Herald." She subscribed to it and read it faithfully even though she lived more than 700 miles away.
I flipped through it sometimes too. I can remember the ads for Rogers Grocery store on the back page. And I always thought it was funny to read newspaper stories about the social activities of regular citizens. You could read articles about who went to visit who after church and who had relatives coming into town. In fact, once the newspaper found out that my grandparents and my sister and I were visiting and they wrote about us, which was quite a thrill for a kid.
I just looked up the website for the newspaper and was surprised to see that they are indeed online. And all of the charm of the old newspaper came rushing back. From the way the columnists refer to readers as "gentle readers" and "dear friends and neighbors" to the way they speak freely about topics like Christmas.
Check out this insight from an editorial called "Most Wonderful Time":
"I really think Christmas doesn’t (one might even venture to say shouldn’t) happen in department stores, shopping malls, jewelry shops or toy stores. The same goes for Christmas parades, community festivals and musical programs. And I’ll even risk ostracization by saying that Christmas can’t be found in traditional candle-lit church services or contemporary-feel-good-glorified-tent-revivals. These are only reminders, and pale, human reminders at that.
"Christmas happened a couple of millennia ago, in a filthy barn where the creator of the universe, for reasons of his own, chose to give humankind the greatest gift we have ever received. Christmas has a chance, but just a chance, to happen again every second of every day in every human heart. If it doesn’t happen there, and spread outward with every breath we take into everything we say and do to and for the humblest of our fellows, all the reminders in the world mean exactly zilch."
How good is that?
I just clicked on the subscription page and found out that I too could begin receiving the newspaper, much like my grandmother did for many years, for just $25.00 a year. How could I not subscribe? So I printed the subscription sign up sheet and will be mailing it the next time I send out my bills.
And the tradition will continue.
