Notes from my Knapsack 12-18-2025 replacement

Notes from my Knapsack 12-18-2025 replacement
Jeff Gill

My Christmas wish list for you
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Here we are on the final stretch to Christmas Day, Christmas joy, Christmas packages and presents and dinners.

Shopping is pretty much a done deal, right? I know there's a thought we could all go out and cram the stores and shopping malls on the last weekend before Christmas Eve, but that seems almost as quaint as roasting chestnuts or lighting candles on the tree.

We all have Christmas lists of one sort or another. Shopping for those holiday parties and meals, gifts to purchase for family and friends, and if you're fortunate, you have someone who wants you to make a list for them of what you want for Christmas. Mostly that's a childhood thing, but you can do it as an adult, as well.

What I'd like to do is give you all a Christmas list, but not of what I want you to get for me (that'd be non-sequential bills in bundles of a thousand, unmarked), but what I wish for you. Maybe my Christmas wish list is in line with what you'd like to get, maybe it won't be, but it's sincere on my part, and perhaps worth considering as what you could want to receive this holiday season.

For you, I wish for a good walk in a warm coat on a crisp night, snow all around, moonlight overhead, and going long enough to see a variety of lights and decorations not just on the outside of houses, but also the trees in the window lit up and ready to do. Don't trespass, don't be a stalker, but who doesn't like to see a Christmas tree from the street? Walking is something we all could do with a bit more of, a great deal more frequently. To start, I wish for you a Christmas season stroll. Add miles as you see fit.

May your stove have some activity this holiday season. If you store stuff in there, take it out, put it on the porch or something, and make cookies. Not your thing? You know, they sell cookie rounds with faces and trees and such on them that you take out of the package, put on a cookie sheet (or sheet pan), and bake in the oven. Warm cookies, I wish for you. Cookie dough is not that hard, though. And you might be surprised at how easy it is to bake bread. In any case, good warm food from your oven I wish for you.

And while I know Christmas cards are largely lost in the flurry of email and internet communications, and Christmas letters are an easily mocked genre of humble-bragging, I wish for you a note. A note you write, with pen (or pencil, or crayon, or Sharpie if that's your jam) and paper, and you put in the mail with a stamp (they sell them at the Post Office, still a deal when you think about it), and send it to… someone. I don't care who. But there's someone you can send a note to. Not a card, sorry, but a note. A note in a card if you want, but at least three sentences, written without AI, to someone you have something to say to.

Those are my Christmas wishes, for you. May all your wishes of the holiday season be fulfilled, whatever they are!


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got his own list, and is checking it twice. Tell him if you've been naughty or nice at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Notes from my Knapsack 12-18-2025

Notes from my Knapsack 12-18-2025
Jeff Gill

"We done all for your husband we could"
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Theresa Reid was born in Madison Township, east of Newark, in 1841. By all accounts, she was familiarly known as "Thersey," likely a childhood nickname that stuck.

When she was eighteen she married Evan Jones, a Welshman about the same age who had emigrated with his family to Ohio in 1853; they had three children, two sons and a daughter, in fairly short order, and possibly even before the third child was born Evan Jones went off to war with the Thirty-first Ohio Volunteer Infantry, his younger brother John Paul Jones serving in the same unit.

Their regiment was part of the Army of the Cumberland in the west; history tends to center the Army of the Potomac and the Civil War closer to Washington & Richmond, but the western campaigns from Shiloh to Vicksburg, from the Cumberland valley to the gates of Atlanta, were where a majority of Licking County soldiers served.

Evan and John fought across Tennessee, at Chickamauga where both were wounded, and in the siege of Chattanooga before the push into Georgia. Most of us know about the burning of Atlanta from "Gone With the Wind," and then the famous "March to the Sea" under General Sherman's command, local lad that William Tecumseh Sherman was. The march was an attempt to decisively sever the Confederacy's supply lines, burning a swath of farmlands and plantations all the way to Savannah, and it is generally noted as a complete Union victory, and devastation for the South.

There were, however, some Union casualties. Thersey Jones, 161 years ago this week, would get a letter from a relative stranger, just before Christmas 1864.


MILLEDGEVILLE, GEORGIA, December, 17, 1864.
     Mrs. Thersay F. Jones:  It is under peculiar circumstances that I drop you a line.  On the twenty-fourth of last month, while Sherman's army (or a part of it) was in this place, Mr. John Jones came to my house and desired me to take his sic brother (Evan Jones) and take care of him, as he was very sick and not able to be carried any farther.  In humanity, my wife and self agree to take him and nurse him the best we could, though we were badly situated to do so, for the army had taken everything we possessed, except our dwelling house.  They killed every chicken, every hog, and drove off every cow, took all my corn, and eat up every potato, pulled down and burned all the out-buildings; but notwithstanding all this, we done the very best we could for your husband, and we don't think he was in want of medicine, food, or attention, that he did not get.  He had camp diarrhœa and fever, and died on the twenty-ninth day of November, 1864.  He was prepared to die, and only regretted leaving his wife and children.  The day before he died, some of the medicine his physician left for him gave out.  I went immediately to see the Confederate post surgeon, Dr. Bratton, who is a nice man and good physician; he came forthwith to see him, and left medicine with directions, and gave every necessary attention, but told us he was too near gone to be saved.  Our town was so badly used up and everything destroyed it was with difficulty I procured his burial.  The post surgeon sent me help and buried him not far from my house near where Sherman's army buried some of their dead.  You may never know with any certainty, but I say to you as a truth, we done all for your husband we could.  I would write more if it was allowed to pass.

Respectfully,
W.  A.  Williams

It is perhaps no surprise that, following the war, Thersey married her husband's brother John, and they had a child themselves as they raised Evan's three. They had almost forty years together; Thersey outlived John, and had a third marriage to a Knox County widower whom she also survived, finally buried next to John in 1913 on her death at age 72.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's fascinated by these insights into everyday life long ago and hopes you are, too. Tell him what tales intrigue you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.

Faith Works 12-12-2025

Faith Works 12-12-2025
Jeff Gill

Advent's third week in an ancient way of reflection
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This is perhaps the most challenging part of my attempt to commend an ancient model for observing Advent, this third week.

The old recommendation of the church is to reflect in Advent on the "four last things" which is to say: death, judgment, hell, and heaven. Which means we've come to deal with Hell.

Yes, that may seem utterly un-Christmas-ish in theme, but is it? Are the consequences of life misspent and ill-used, outside of the comforts of faith and hope, really outside of a Christian's Christmas consideration?

The answer is no if only because of Charles Dickens. Some of the most vivid evocations of Hades and hellfire I know come from that most Christmasy of tales: "A Christmas Carol."

It's in the book, from 1843. We hear a terrifying warning from the ghost of Jacob Marley:

""I wear the chains I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?"

Scrooge trembled…"

Recall that? And how the Ghost cautions Scrooge about "the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago… It is a ponderous chain!"

The theological perspectives of Dickens can be debated at length, but it's clear there's a warning beyond just this life intended in the lines he gives the cautionary spirit to speak to Ebenezer Scrooge:
 
"Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed," cried the phantom, "not to know, that ages of incessant labour by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunities misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!"

Of course Scrooge, flustered, tries to counter this grim depiction by telling him "you were always a good man of business, Jacob…" Marley's response is worth recalling in full:

"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!" (Scrooge goes on to see other phantoms, all in grief, bemoaning their inability to do now what they could have done when in life. It sounds very much like… Hell.)

In our Advent mediations, it's worth taking into account that even a relatively secular saint, Charles Dickens, saw a bit of Hell as one of the perspectives woven into the season. The 1938 film version with Reginald Owen, like most visualizations of the story, puts a clear hint of brimstone in the scene at Scrooge's own tombstone.

But the 1983 Disney animated "Christmas Carol," with Mickey as Bob Cratchit, puts Scrooge McDuck appropriately enough in the key role, and when confronted with the grave and what lies beyond, there's outright flame and fear enough for any hardshell preacher.

Disney's point, like anyone's intention, I believe, in evoking the prospect of future consequences is to turn someone's heart to reform, to redemption, to being saved from such an outcome, and saved for a better day not just on earth but in heaven as well.

That's how Hell already has a place at a modern Christmas table, through "A Christmas Carol." Perhaps the old ways are not gone, but working under the surface in ways we have to look at closely, to see as still relevant today.

And to get us on the path to heaven, which is our theme next week!


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he remembers being scared by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come as a child. Tell him how you work through your fears in this happy season at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.