The happiest person on earth

The Happiest Person on Earth
For our family, Christmas begins in October. Each year my mother puts up our artificial tree and strings the lights around it the weekend before Halloween. This is herway of reminding herself the holiday season is near and she needs to prepare for it.
My family is rather small, consisting of my mother, my younger brother, and myself. Being divorced, my mother hashad to work very hard for the little we have. Christmas had never been a festive occasion in our home. We never had very much. Sometimes my brother and I would feel embarrassed as we compared our fewpresents to the many our friends received. Everyone else always seemed to have so much more than we did.
A few years ago, after my mother put up the Christmas tree, she turned to where my brother andI were silently watching and delivered her annual speech, which always contained the same ideas.
“Well, kids,” she would say, “this year is going to be a really hard Christmas. I’m sorry I can’t giveyou very much.” Once again we accepted the fact that Christmas that year would be another poor one.
Within a week of her talk with us, there was a knock at our door. It was two missionaries from TheChurch of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They taught our family, we were eventually converted, and in early December we were baptized.
Christmas that year could have been the worst. My motherwas working 16 hours a day, and I was baby-sitting whenever I could to try to help. Even so, we just barely had enough money for our family to survive. We were really feeling down, and our mood affectedeverything we did. My brother and my mother started to argue more than they usually did. I was ill, so I was not in a good mood either. I didn’t want Christmas to come that year. There seemed to beno Christmas cheer in our house.
This soon changed. On the night of December 23, someone knocked on our door. When my mother answered it, nobody was there, but on our doorstep were two large boxes....