The single pane glass of the old wood windows in the house I grew up in would drip with condensation every night when it was cold outside. We'd have to wipe it away in order to try to see outside. My sister and I would do that on snowy evenings, looking up at the streetlight in order to get a better idea of how much it was snowing ... and we'd hope ... hope for a snow day.

On the night I remember best though -- when I was probably seven or perhaps just barely eight -- there wasn't an option of school the next day. This was Christmas Eve. Earlier in the evening, we saw the weatherman on television project where Santa was as he traveled around the globe. As we looked out that steam-covered window and up toward the streetlight, our hope was to catch a glimpse of the big guy in the red suit.

My family always waited and opened our gifts on Christmas Day. Well, I take that back -- sometimes we'd each get to open one gift on Christmas Eve. I only remember one of the gifts that was opened that evening and that was the gift that mom unwrapped. Dad, sis and I had chosen a kitchen radio for my mom. It had a big white case with a decorative molded plastic design over the speaker. A large orange button turned it off and on. And, of course, this was way before the days of anything being digital, so you had to turn the knob to select that station you wanted to listen to. A silver antenna could be pulled up from the back of the radio to try to catch those really distant stations. To my mind, that meant foreign countries. To technology at the time, though, it meant Fort Wayne or maybe Detroit. The radio mounted on the wall and it ran on batteries. Four "C" cells if I remember correctly, which you accessed by swinging open the entire front of the radio.

I am not sure we ever actually hung it on the wall in the old house with the old windows that I grew up in. A couple of years later, we moved to a new house in a bigger town and the radio was mounted on the kitchen wall there. It would often confuse people that we had an intercom in the house because it looked a bit more like an intercom box than a radio. I remember the radio still working and hanging on the kitchen wall, even after I'd graduated from college. Whenever mom was in the kitchen, the radio was on, playing music, the news, or the weather.

That Christmas Eve, after mom had opened up her new radio, she let my sister and I listen to it as we looked out that condensation-covered window. From looking at the streetlight, we could see some snow coming down. We were sure it wouldn't be enough to slow down Santa's reindeer though. He could always get through.

The radio had been tuned in to receive a station in Lima that was playing only Christmas carols that evening. We wiped away the moisture on the windows, looked toward the sky, and hoped to catch a glimpse of that sleigh and those flying reindeer, wondering all the while what gifts we would be surprised with the next morning. Later, sleep didn't come easily that evening but it did come eventually. I am sure there were lots of gifts that next morning but the only gift I remember from that Christmas was the radio. I wish I had that radio with its big orange button but at some point the orange button broke, the radio was taken down from the wall and tossed out, replaced by a newer and smaller radio. A radio that worked fine, of course, but was without Christmas memories.

Though he is now a bit older than I was in this story, I hope that this Christmas will leave my son with at least one happy memory of childhood innocence that will last him a lifetime.