Mom's Birthday Candle

My mother was born on December 14^th 1918. One Saturday morning in early December 1961 my 7 year-old sister and I decided we needed to buy my mother a birthday present. We asked my mom for some money to buy her a gift and she reluctantly gave us $3 or $4. As luck would have it, my father had planned to do some Christmas shopping that day at Lazarus Department Store, located in downtown Columbus. With money in hand, my sister and I went along.

At the Lazarus front doors, we kids split up from my dad, promising to meet him later at some predetermined location. Over the next half hour or so the two of us explored a number of different store departments in search of the perfect birthday present for my mom. We looked at baseball gloves, ballet slippers, even cheap cuckoo clocks, but we found nothing that we both thought my mother would like. Then, like a miracle, my sister and I came upon an approximately four foot-tall, electric Christmas candle made of heavy-duty plastic. Down the side of the candle in big yellow letters was the word NOEL. We just knew my mother would love it.

We hid the candle in the garage until we could wrap it, complete with stick-on bow. A few days later, on my mother’s birthday, we presented her with our fabulous gift. To our utter shock, frustration surfaced upon my mom’s face the instant the candle was wrestled free of the wrapping paper. “This is not an appropriate gift for someone’s birthday,” she grumbled. She then pushed it away as she shook her head in agitation. I remember it like it was yesterday. My sister and I were crestfallen.

Over the years the candle became known as “Mom’s Birthday Candle”. It was never referred to as “The Christmas Candle”, or “The Noel Candle”. Never. The oversized candle with the light bulb inside the big, yellow, plastic flame was simply “Mom’s Birthday Candle”. And every Christmas for almost 50 years it could be found brightening my Mom’s porch. Now and then over the various holiday seasons my mother would journey outside to wipe off the candle with a rag, or replace a burned-out light bulb. And if the weather turned really foul, she would bring the candle inside to safety.

One December several years ago, a few months before my mother died, I was carrying the candle through the living room, bound for the front porch. Along the way I traveled by my mother as she relaxed in her favorite chair. “Time to set-out your birthday candle,” I said casually.

“I remember the first time I saw that candle,” my mother quietly stated. “I was angry.”

I stopped and turned towards her. “Yeah, I remember. Believe me, I remember.”

“It wasn’t just that you bought me a big, plastic candle, it’s that you used my money to buy it.”

“It was a dumb gift,” I admitted with a shrug and a grin.

“At first I thought it was the stupidest gift in the world,” my mother remarked, “but I’ve received a lot of birthday presents in my life, and the truth is, very few have come to mean more to me than that big candle. So maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t such a stupid gift after all.”

Mom, wherever you are, I just want you to know; this holiday season your birthday candle will be glowing.