In 1961 my Dad built a large hog farm and "processing" plant. If you don’t know what that is, pigs go in one end and sausage comes out the other. It was the first modern designed processing plant in Nacogdoches County. Dad borrowed heavily to build it. Shortly after he built it the price of sausage went down so low and the price of feed so high that Dad could not make the loan payments on time. He did everything he could to cut costs; he even went around and picked up left over food at restaurants and fed it to the hogs.

I was 8 years old and didn't know enough to worry about Christmas presents. Dad now tells me that he was worried about how to afford Christmas. Back then Dad had heard of but had never seen a credit card. A department store named Bealls in Nacogdoches mailed out credit cards that year (back then they could mail out cards without you even requesting them first). Mom & Dad decided they were going to buy our Christmas on credit.

Then just before Christmas, Sam Davis, an employee at the processing plant was arrested and put in jail. Sam might have been a bad man, I don't know, but he left behind a wife and five small children that weren't going to have Christmas at all. At Sam’s request, my father had driven over to Sam’s house and delivered his pay to Sam’s wife. Dad saw the place they lived and drove home more worried about the Davis’s than worried about us. Dad came home and talked to Mom about what had happened.

Mom and Dad went over and picked up Mrs. Davis and her children and drove them to Bealls Department Store and bought them all a set of new clothes and shoes. Mrs. Davis said this was the first new clothes her kids had ever had and she couldn’t remember when she had a new set of clothes herself. This used up most or all of Mom & Dad's credit limit.

That night Dad came to each of us kids and told us that we would be receiving just a few toys for Christmas. We would also be giving half of our old toys away. We picked out unbroken toys and cleaned them up. Mom touched up the paint and washed and ironed doll clothes, and my sisters and I gift-wrapped them (Charlie was still a baby and not much help). Dad put the toys in a big bag and I watched him put on a Santa suit he had borrowed.

That night I rode with him in our pickup to a very poor part of Nacogdoches where the houses were really just one room wooden boxes with naked light bulbs hanging down in the center. Dad found the Davis’s house and went in as Santa, "Ho Ho Ho!". I sat in the truck in the cold dark night and looked thru the doorway at the kid’s excited faces and heard them laugh and cheer.

I was eight years old when I found out who Santa really was and I cried and laughed out in the truck.