Christmas Jars Read online

  Christmas Jars

  Jason F. Wright

  © 2005 Jason F. Wright.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Shadow Mountain®. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Shadow Mountain.

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wright, Jason F.

  Christmas Jars / Jason F. Wright.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-10 1-59038-481-4 (pbk.)

  ISBN-13 978-1-59038-481-7 (pbk.)

  ISBN-10 1-59038-699-X (hardbound)

  ISBN-13 978-1-59038-699-6 (hardbound)

  1. Women journalists—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.R539C48 2005

  813'.6—dc22 2005015521

  10 9 8 7 6 5

  For my children

  Oakli Shane

  Jadi Thompson

  and

  Kason Samuel

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Acknowledgments

  ~

  I am forever grateful for the support of my mother, Sandra Fletcher Wright. I also acknowledge the enormous support of my brothers, Sterling and Jeff; my sister, Terilynne; and their spouses, Ann Marie Holienka and John Butler. I also thank my wife, Kodi Erekson Wright, for her unending faith in me, even when I merit none. She is a beautiful woman with a lovely, matching soul. I also recognize my father, Willard Samuel Wright. There are no words to express how deeply he is missed.

  A debt of gratitude is also due to my incomparable product director, Chris Schoebinger, and to Sheri Dew, Jeff Simpson, Gail Halladay, Angie Godfrey, Richard Peterson, Lisa Mangum, Laurie Cook, Tonya Facemyer, Sheryl Dickert Smith, Bob Grove, and the rest of the talented team at Shadow Mountain Publishing.

  Very special thanks also go to my agent and friend, Laurie Liss. Also to Glenn Beck, Cameron Birch, Kerri Houston, Tony Johnson, Janeal Rogers, Malcolm Wallop, and Charlotte Wellen.

  Since the first printing of Christmas Jars, many readers across the country have contacted me to share their own personal Christmas Jar miracle. I’ve been told of jars brimming with change left in the dead of night, jars handed off to strangers in hospital parking lots, jars magically appearing on kitchen counters, the work of caring, stealthy neighbors. Children have opened their eyes Christmas morning to find gifts and joy they could only have dreamed of days before. All this because someone saw a need and chose to serve.

  It is indeed thrilling that the spirit of Christmas Jars is now bigger than this book or any single inspirational story. It has a life of its own, with countless stories and no limits to the good it can do. Each of you is to be thanked for fueling this simple miracle.

  I hope that when you give your own jar away, or if you’ve received this book with a jar meant for you, you will visit www.christmasjars.com and tell me about it. The world would love to hear your anonymous story.

  Merry Christmas.

  Prologue

  ~

  Introducing Hope

  Louise Jensen was sitting alone, licking her fingers two at a time and paying serious attention to her greasy chicken-leg-and-thigh platter, when she heard muffled crying from the booth behind her at Chuck’s Chicken ’n’ Biscuits on U.S. Highway 4. It was early Friday afternoon. It was also New Year’s Eve.

  Although discovering an unattended, blue-eyed, newborn baby girl was not on her list of expectations, Louise was the faithful brand of woman who believed that everything happened for a reason. She reached down and lifted the pinkish baby into her arms. Tucked inside a stained elephant blanket, near the baby’s neck, she found an unsigned, handwritten note:

  To the next person to hold my baby girl,

  She is yours now. I’ll miss her more than you know. But I love her too much to raise her with a daddy that hits. Truth is, he didn’t even want me to have her anyways, and her life will be better without a mommy that will always need to run. Please tell her I love her. And please tell her I will hold her again.

  I cannot give her much, but this year I give her the life her daddy wouldn’t. And a little bit of hope.

  Though a middle-aged, never-married house cleaner—and one hardly in a position to assume financial responsibility for another mouth—Louise knew this was no random moment. Every year she ate Christmas Eve dinner at Chuck’s. But one week ago she’d been bedridden, caught in the throes of a punishing bout with influenza. So with a 103-degree temperature and with pained reluctance she had postponed—for the first time ever—her annual chicken dinner. The spring had returned to Louise’s step the morning of the thirty-first, three full days before she’d expected, and she had ventured off to Chuck’s.

  Her eyes darted around the dining room at the handful of semi-strangers, and she sensed that without realizing it, the mother of this baby had somehow known that on New Year’s Eve, at that very hour, Louise Jensen would finally be eating a belated but traditional Christmas Eve dinner.

  She looked around at the oblivious diners, eating and chatting about grand plans for the year ahead, their faces illuminated by the glow of Chuck’s overdone red and green holiday decorations. Above their heads hung silver tinsel, draped over faded lampshades, and an artificial tree guarded the door. High atop the tree, instead of a traditional star or white angel, sat a stuffed frowny-face cartoon chicken. At the cash register, Chuck’s wife was changing the batteries in a boogie-dancing Santa.

  Louise nestled the baby in her coat, left a ten-dollar bill on the table, and slipped out the side door. “Happy New Year, Louise!” someone called just as the door swung shut. She did a half turn and smiled back, keeping her stride and not slowing until she reached her rusty El Camino at the far end of the parking lot. She looked both ways—twice—then buckled the bundled baby into the passenger seat and rolled as slowly as the engine allowed approximately four miles to the nearest business district. She talked her way down the road, asking questions for which she feared she’d never hear the answers, and for the first time in history feeling grateful for the flu.

  Born herself to a single mother, Louise made independence central to her life plan long before she took her first job babysitting for a half dozen children in her apartment complex. She was ten at the time.

  A healthy appreciation of work was hardwired into a long line of Jensens. For as long as Louise could remember, her mother had worked as many as three jobs simultaneously. Her mom saved what she could, praying that one day Louise and her brother would go to college and accomplish more than she had. But Louise never imagined a life beyond what she’d lived with her mother. Her idol worked every day until her hands and back were sore, treating everyone she met like family, and burying needless criticism of others so deep beneath the soil of everyday living that only kindness ever saw the light.

  While Louise’s brother was away attending technical college, Louise graduated from high school and continued working right alongside her mother. Though most of her childhood friends appeared to stop growing sometime before graduation, Louise added another three inches between her eighteenth and twentieth years. She fin
ally stopped at a barefoot six-feet tall. Her thick, dark brown hair fell down and ended at the small of her back. Her eyes were big and milk-chocolate brown—the kind no one forgets.

  Louise and her mother took on restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, and even a service station or two. But what they most enjoyed was cleaning the homes of a small circle of wealthy clients. Together, they turned their two-woman maid service into an art form, cleaning every home as if it were their own.

  The pair worked for affluent families. Louise and her mother soaked in the atmosphere of husbands, wives, and their usually well-behaved children living at full speed. Though on the surface they kept a professional distance, silent relationships of trust flourished, and they learned to love and admire the good people they cleaned up after.

  After Louise’s mother died, Louise kept right on cleaning. She never thought it odd that she felt closest to her mother, friend, and business partner when tackling dust bunnies or when on her knees scrubbing linoleum floors.

  ~

  Louise was in love with the fussy baby girl by the time she strapped her into the brand-new infant car seat. And by the next morning she would have fought to her own death to keep her. “Possession is nine-tenths,” she told a social worker on the phone.

  A thorough investigation produced no leads as to the identity of the mother. No one recalled seeing the baby’s mother in Chuck’s that night; no one had seen anything out of the ordinary; and not a soul had ever returned to ask the question one might expect: “So, who’s raising my daughter?” The mother, they all reasoned, was long gone. She had moved on, and so too must the rest of them.

  After months of family court hearings, interviews, surprise spot-check home visits, and stacks of red tape, the state finally admitted what Louise and her small circle of friends had known all along: she would make a perfectly suitable mother. Not only that, the court ruled, but Louise Jensen represented the baby’s best chance for a good life. Not that it mattered what the court said; Louise wouldn’t have given her up anyway.

  Driving away from what she prayed was her last visit to a courthouse, Louise looked in the rearview mirror at the child she’d known only as “baby.”

  “We’re family now,” Louise said aloud. “What should we call you?”

  She named the baby Hope.

  ~

  It didn’t take long for Hope Jensen to realize her mother was crazy. “But the good crazy,” she would tell her elementary school playmates. Soon after Hope’s fifth birthday, Louise sat her daughter down in their favorite booth at Chuck’s and prepared to play out the scene she had rehearsed hundreds of times in front of the bathroom mirror. As Hope played tic-tac-toe with hot tater tots, her mother shared the handwritten note and the unvarnished truth behind their first meeting. A few familiar onlookers, keenly aware of what was unfolding before them, watched with caring curiosity.

  “Then you’re not my mommy?” Hope asked during the first natural pause.

  “Of course I am, sweetheart.” The sensation of tears in Louise’s eyes was not a familiar one. “Hope Jensen, I am every bit your mother today as I was yesterday. And the same goes for tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after that.”

  Hope nodded her head as if this were just another piece of the colorful mosaic they painted together. “Will we ever see her again?” Hope asked.

  “I don’t know, sugar,” Louise answered. “But I bet she’d like to see you one day.” She reached across the table and placed Hope’s innocent hands in her own. “You know what? It sure couldn’t have been easy saying good-bye to one of God’s most special little girls.”

  Hope sat quietly, processing the unfolding news, balancing sweetener packets on the end of a saltshaker. “Did she love me?”

  “Of course she did, sugar,” answered Louise. “She loved you so much, she gave you a better life.”

  Louise’s concern for her daughter dissolved with the very next question.

  “Okay, Mom. So can I get a limeade now?”

  One

  ~

  On her last day of kindergarten, Hope Jensen announced, walking hand in hand with her mother, that she had finally made a decision about her career. “One day I will grow up to become either president of the United States or a famous newspaper reporter.”

  “The latter is more honorable,” her mother teased.

  Hope agreed and eventually set her sights on the newsroom.

  Everyone who knew her suspected that Hope began writing in the womb. As a baby, paper and pencils were in her hands more than rattles and teething biscuits. By the second grade, she was writing a series of plays about a friendly gang of motorcycle-riding bunnies. In the third grade she wrote a heart-wrenching short story about a homeless mouse that saved his family by winning the state lottery. During the fourth and fifth grades she wrote a one-page family newsletter called the Jensen Report. And as a gangly sixth-grader, Hope compiled an impressive list of addresses for all sorts of distant cousins, teachers, former teachers, and some people they later learned they had no relationship with at all. A four-page spread was mailed every other Monday to forty subscribers in six states plus Canada.

  Hope grew into a striking-looking young woman. Through the years, her once-baby blue eyes had added a rich green at their edges. “Those aren’t eyes,” Louise told her, “they’re jewels.” Her often-pony-tailed hair was darker than most would have expected for such light eyes and fair skin.

  Hope often thought of the mysterious woman who had left her in the booth at Chuck’s. “Mom, do you think she still lives around here? Does she look like me? Do you think she likes pink lemonade more than yellow, like me? Does she ever think of me?”

  “It just might be.” It became Louise’s default answer to most of the impossible questions. Hope’s heart believed that one day she would get real answers, but her head told her otherwise.

  Beginning on her second Christmas Eve, and every Christmas Eve thereafter, Hope and Louise Jensen kept the tradition alive by eating an early dinner at Chuck’s. The meal was always the same: chicken, biscuits with real butter, and free pie with all the vanilla ice cream they could eat. They took slow and deliberate bites, telling stories and sharing visions of what lay ahead.

  “You never know,” Hope would tell her mother more than once as the third hour approached. “This could be the year.”

  “It just might be,” her mother answered. But the mystery woman never came.

  “Next year,” Hope said, as if it were a matter of proven fact. “I just know it!”

  ~

  “The precocious one,” as her mother’s friends liked to call Hope, became the first underclassman to be named editor-in-chief of the school paper during her sophomore year of high school. Assigning stories, editing, and selling newspaper advertising was fine, but it was writing the stories that provided the hook. “I think she bleeds ink,” her mother beamed.

  Hope’s crowning moment, as high school faded into yearbook memories, was a feature article about the senior class career counselor who would die without a costly liver transplant. The student body raised almost nineteen thousand dollars. The counselor lived, and Hope’s poignant story tied for first place in a nationwide, high-school journalism contest.

  To earn extra credit, and because she already knew how she planned to earn her real paychecks, Hope applied for and was awarded an internship at the Daily Record. It wasthe only serious newspaper in four surrounding towns. She did whatever was asked, mastering everything from the bottled water dispenser to the copy and mail-metering machines. Just two weeks after graduation she was offered a paid position.

  Hope’s first stop was a tiny cubicle in Classifieds. “It’s a start,” she told her mother the night they photocopied and framed her very first paycheck. Hope the wunderkind was on her road to a Pulitzer Prize and aimed to be the next great American journalist. Headshots of her idols—Bernstein, Woodward, and Graham—formed a square on the wall above her desk. The fourth frame that completed the square contained n
o photo. Instead, taped under the glass was a white piece of copy paper with the words “I’M NEXT,” written in thick block letters in black marker.

  Her job required just twenty-eight hours a week and offered plenty of downtime to take classes at the community college. When people called the paper, the voice on the other end of the phone belonged to the energetic eighteen-year-old writing

  the best ads twenty-nine dollars a week could buy. “Hottest House on the Block!” “This Candy Apple Firebird Is a Head Turner!” Nobody wrote them like Hope.

  After a year of writing ads and pushing the latest “this week only” special, she was promoted to the community page, where she wrote scintillating stories on upcoming fall carnivals, book fairs, and firehouse bake sales. “I could write this stuff in my sleep,” she told her mother.

  “Patience, my dear. Patience.”

  Another eighteen months of hard work, plus year-round school, and Hope was in her final term in the journalism program. “It’s time for more,” she told her boss. Before her next payday she was promoted once again, this time to the editorial page. She surprised her mother with the news over takeout.

  “You’re a wonder,” Louise said. “I am so proud of you.”

  They finished their tacos and chips as Hope fantasized aloud of the accomplishments to come. “I’ll write a feature, I just know I will, and it will land on A1, the front page! They call that above the fold, Mom.”

  “I didn’t know—”

  “And of course it’ll win Story of the Year. And you just know I’ll be writing for the Washington Post before the plaque even arrives.”

  They ate every visible chip crumb, no matter how small, even licking their fingers to pull the final tiny shards up and onto their tongues. After they’d discarded their tinfoil wrappings and paper bags, Louise beckoned her high-flying daughter to the couch for some important news of her own. The words were as simple and stunning as Hope had ever heard.