Sometime when we lived in Mississippi, I started frying turkeys. At first I would fry one for us at Christmas. Then later I decided to take my cooker to Montgomery for Thanksgiving and fry a couple of birds there.
After we moved back to Atlanta, as Christmas approached that year Lib and I started talking about frying a turkey for Christmas. Since it takes a pretty good amount of oil to fry a turkey, if you are going to fry one, you may as well fry two. So I posed the question to Lib, “Should we cook one for our local Sandy Springs fire station?” She thought it was a good idea. I spoke to the Captain one evening and set things in motion.
That Christmas Day in 2005, I brought their fried turkey into the house, put it in a pan, and covered it with foil. “Lib, I’m going to take the turkey to the fire station,” I called out.
“Wait a minute! Let me go with you,” she responded.
“I want to go, too,” said Anne.
“Wait for me!” Kathryn yelled. So off we went to the fire station to drop off a freshly-fried turkey.
When we walked in, it was like someone had kicked over an anthill. Those firefighters and their families came out of nowhere. We set the turkey down, said a quick prayer asking the Lord to give them a quiet day, and then headed home. About halfway home, Kathryn said, “That was FUN!” Anne quickly added, “Can we do this again next year?”
And so the Roberts’s Christmas tradition began. This year we will continue to keep it alive, trying to say in a simple but tangible way how thankful we are for firefighters and their service.
Christmas has become for us a way to model our giving. God gave a gift to us in His Son Jesus. We try to mimic that giving in a quiet yet straightforward way. Our family remembers that first gift to those Mississippi firefighters (treasure it in our hearts) and go home every year thanking God for His gift to us.