Today is the first day of Advent… Soooo …. I’m running a four part Christmas story that I wrote long ago that reflects the waiting and anticipation of the coming of Jesus. 

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The Fourth Monday Before Christmas

“Doris, for the life of me, I just can’t figure them people out!” muttered Nell. The older of the Sheppard sisters, motioned toward the house across the street then bent over a basket full of laundry to be folded and put away.

It was Monday, laundry day, a bit less than a month before Christmas. Doris, the quieter of the sisters, looked up from the catalog in her lap and mumbled, “Uh-huh…” She was more interested in the catalog than the strange people who moved in across the street a couple of months back.

For most of the seventy-some years that Doris and Nell had lived there, they had been the eyes and ears of the old neighborhood. Nothing much escaped their attentive gazes. Daily, even though they would vehemently deny it, at least one sister was positioned within scouting distance of the front picture window, standing watch. So, when the Davidsons moved in, Doris did her duty. Like a pirate from the crow’s-nest, she sounded the alarm from her lookout perch. “Ohhhh boooy! What’s this now?” she trilled, which was enough to bring Nell a-running.

Perhaps to others, those ‘strange’ people, Joey and Ruth Davidson, appeared fairly normal. One time, Ruth tried to be neighborly, knocked on the Sheppard sisters’ door and introduced herself. She even invited them over to her house for tea. “My husband, Joey, just made some mighty fine pumpkin bread,” Ruth tempted. However, Nell and Doris weren’t use to such overt displays of neighborliness. To them it seemed peculiar. So, with Doris peeking around Nell’s shoulder, Nell cautiously, albeit politely, refused. And that was it for personal contact with the new neighbors. They went their separate ways, and from their solitary observatory the sisters’ surveillance began in earnest.