The True Story of the Red Headed Angel
By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here
(Note: This column was first printed in December 1990. It has become a classic Christmas column for Bill Duncan and although altered somewhat from the original, it is still the same Christmas story.)
Some years ago my eldest son, John, gave his mother an angel to top the Christmas Tree. He thought it should replace the battered old star that had topped our tree since he was in diapers. Admittedly the old star had shone in better days.
When it came time to put the Christmas tree, I asked my wife where John’s angel was. She replied that she really didn’t think she wanted to put it on the tree at all.
Why? I asked.
With feminine logic, she replied: "It is a redheaded angel."
So, what’s wrong with a redheaded angel?
"Have you ever seen a redheaded angel?"
I admitted I’ve known a few red heads in my life, but never intimately enough to call them angel.
"Never mind," she said, "I’m talking about the celestial kind. Just put the old star like you do every year," she instructed.
Did you ever think that Jesus might have been redheaded?
"I never saw a redheaded Jesus," she countered.
I didn’t feel a need to argue the wisdom of Judaism, so I just asked, are you going to leave that poor redheaded angel stuffed in the box?
"Yes. It just doesn’t fit my idea of an angel."
For years the redheaded angel languished in a box on a back shelf of a storage cabinet in the utility room.
That was until the winter of 1989. I was in the Portland VA hospital awaiting surgery. I had been taken to Portland from the Roseburg VA by ambulance over ice-coated Interstate 5.
The medical team decided to perform an angioplasty on the clogged artery in my heart. Days later I was deemed fit to go home.
There were a few problems, however. I arrived at the hospital in government issued pajamas and had no other clothes. The VA issued me a pair of paper pajamas to face the 10 degree weather outside on my trip home.
With the help of the Red Cross I managed to get fitted with enough donated clothes to look like I’d just come to town in a Southern Pacific box car. My next problem was getting from the hospital to the Greyhound bus station for the trip south.
Enter George Wilson, my stockbroker nephew who lived in Portland. George said he had a four-wheel-drive Jeep that could safely take the slippery I-5 freeway.
I accepted his offer. We started out from Portland before noon and arrived in Roseburg after 7 P.m. The freeway looked like a battle zone with abandoned trucks and cars on the side of the freeway, some wrecked, some burned out shells, some just simply stuck.
At the Roseburg end, my wife waited in a total news blackout, not knowing whether George and I were one of the snow storm casualties on the freeway. The news she got from radio and TV about the storm and road conditions were as bleak as the weather outside.
When we finally walked through the door of my home in Roseburg that dark wintry night, I told my wife, "Here is a redheaded angel." Redheaded George looked perplexed.
My wife got the message.
Every year since, John’s redheaded angel sits on top of our Christmas tree. So help me, it has a smug smile on its face.
(Tragically and ironically, George Wilson died of head injuries in 2004 when he slipped on an icy street in Portland. His memory lives on each year atop of Bill Duncan’s Christmas tree. Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)