Around out house we start the holiday season rather early. My music loving daughters have been playing Christmas records since the first week of November. While listening to the familiar strains of the old favorites, I couldn’t help but notice how many were about home or going home.
Christmas means gifts and brightly lit Christmas trees to the young, but for children now grown it brings memories of home and thoughts of going home, if only for the holiday.
In 1943 when I was a lad of 4, my parents moved to Germania Park, a little community between West End and Powderly. 
Around the turn of the century a group of Germans settled there, building sturdy homes with foundations of hand carried stones from nearby Valley Creek. There was once a small amusement park there, complete with a carousel.
We lived in a large nine room house with a covered front porch along its entire width. 
In the 1920’s the house was known as the Lula Foster Home for Boys. On many a Sunday afternoon we’d see a young man afar off, walking down Lee Avenue and we knew it was one of the now grown “boys” that had caught the #3 trolley from Birmingham to come and see the old home once more.
Our property, then owned by the state, was a tremendous 150 ft x 500 ft. It was completely enclosed by a 5 ft high wire fence with 2 x 4’s planks along the top, from post to post. Almost every foot of the back fence was covered in red climbing roses and honeysuckle. In the springtime and fall it was a place of rare beauty.
Behind out home was a good 20 acres of woodland that we could have purchased for a song. But it was just after the war and we didn’t have much to sing with. Eventually the woodlands were cleared and houses were built all around us. The roses lost the fence they’d climbed upon, and as time passed my siblings and I all married and moved away to start families of our own.
Never the less, at Thanksgiving and Christmas our hearts always called us back home, as we still called it. My mother and father were never happier than when their children and grandchildren were gathered together again, even if for just one day.
But time in its way won its usual victory. The old home deteriorated beyond repair and was sold to a builder who wanted to divide the property for new home construction. So one afternoon I drove out from Huffman to see the old home place one last time. I wish now I hadn’t gone because a few days before a bulldozer had completely leveled our old house. I got out of my car and walked over the now vacant lot, overwhelmed with feelings of loss and despair. Memories of youth and childhood flooded over me and a single tear rolled down my face.
As I made my way back to the car in the deepening twilight, my thought turned toward home, my home, where my wife and young children waited for me. When I arrived, the smell of an apple pie in the oven and the sound of my daughter S onja singing “White Christmas” greeted me.
A writer of old once said that “home is a little picture of what Heaven must be like,” and I know now that how true that is. My home is here, with those I love, who love me. One day they’ll be grown and gone, but coming back home for Christmas, hopefully with grandchildren! I look forward to that day.
I guess my purpose in writing this has been to say, don’t wait too late. Go home if you can, while you can. One day, you’ll be glad you did. (Written by Frank Baucom, published in The Birmingham News, early 1970's.)
