Christmas Angels In The Sky

Maybe Yule Be Touched By This Message

Singapore, December 2007. Photograph copyright: DAVID McMAHON

Could I take a minute to tell you about the most amazing Christmas gift I ever received? It didn't have a price tag on it, yet in many ways it was the most priceless gift I could have wished for.

It wasn't gift-wrapped. It wasn't bought in a store. Yet I carry it with me wherever I go.

It was a gift I would like to pass on to all of you. It was a gift I received from a remarkable woman who taught me and my brothers that the most important Christmas attribute is to give, not to receive.

She had so little as a child. She was raised in a Bangalore orphanage, then was looked after by English nuns in a convent in Pune. That school was her only home; the nuns were her surrogate parents. She had nowhere else to go. She never had a home to go to until she married. Yet she never had a chip on her shoulder.

Instead of seeking therapy, she sought only to spread great love to all children. Generations of kids at St Thomas' School in Kidderpore, Calcutta, loved her like their own mother. They hugged her and kissed her - and four decades later they still tell me how much she meant to them. They called her, simply, and with such love, "Aunty Mac".

I know just how much she meant to them. Her name was Phyllis McMahon. She was my mother.

If you'd like to share her gift, please take the time to read my feature article The Great Christmas Surprise at Terry Fletcher's portal. If it makes you laugh, if it makes you think, if it makes you appreciate this season, indeed if it touches you in the slightest way, please send the link to friends and family and ask them to do the same. It is the least we can do at Christmas.

My mother would have liked that, too.


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