When I was a kid, living in Montana, there were times where we were barely holding things together. The economy was severely depressed because the lumber industry was taking a drastic turn. Concepts in how the lumber industry should be run were changing and more attention was being paid to the environment and how to forge partnerships between conservation and business.

My parents didn’t work in the lumber industry but that didn’t matter in western Montana. Everything was tied to lumber and it trickled down. If people were losing jobs, it meant they couldn’t buy other goods, which meant that people like my parents weren’t going to be selling their services or making money either.

And along comes Christmas in the midsts of a severe economic depression.

We had been raised as fairly humble children. Much of the time our gifts were handmade and those were things we cherished (I can still remember the awesome toybox our dad made for us that had a stove painted on it so I could play with that). We didn’t ask for much because we knew that we wouldn’t get it anyway and it wasn’t as important as other things.

This Christmas was even worse though. There was no money. There was hardly any food. We were living off of whatever had come out of the garden and had been canned by my mom.

The skirting beneath the Christmas tree was bare. The stockings hung with nothing in them.

But there were two letters addressed to my parents.

As a kid, letters meant nothing. And sure, it was a disappointment but we had lived a hard life for much of our lives so this wasn’t much different.

On Christmas day, our parents opened the letters. In those, our grandparents had sent gift certificates to grocery stores. They knew exactly what we needed: food. Those gift certificates meant the difference between eating next to nothing and filling our hungry stomachs.

There aren’t many Christmas gifts that I remember 30 years later. That one, though, I do. It was the most valuable Christmas gift that I can remember receiving. It meant everything.