Thoughts.com Blogs - After Christmas Thoughts

We had a wonderful Christmas in the Morgan home. This was true even though my mom went to heaven on April 22nd 07. She passed away while I was in California taping “The Next Best Thing” reality show, after a short sudden illness. We all miss mom very much, and yet, because we know that she is not “dead” in the eternal sense of the word, but very much busy messing up heaven, we have this unquenchable joy. My dad had a great though bittersweet Christmas, because it was his first without his precious angel.

Mom and I were great friends. Before I became a George W. Bush Impersonator, I worked in our family appliance store. My parents opened it in 1948, Chuck Morgan Appliances. Dad had his slogan painted on the delivery truck bumper, “You’ll Never Get Stuck With Chuck.” Mom would say, “Unless you’re married to him.”
For years all we called it was “The Shop.”

I grew up in and around the shop. We actually lived in it when I was born. Well, we lived in the back. My bedroom was really a store room of some sort. As I recall, it had clown wallpaper, and holes in the floor where the rats occasionally went in and out. I got rabies shots when I was thirteen. Did you know that wild mice will bite you if you try to pick them up?

In the bathroom, you could sit and see the stars at night or the grass beneath, due to holes in various places. During rain showers, there were buckets everywhere. We sold stoves at the shop, but for a long time didn’t own one. And dad kept selling our refrigerator.

Eventually we moved into our own home, but the shop was my life. I’d go there after school, because that was where mom and dad both worked.
Mom and I saw each other every day, and through all of life’s events, we had a wonderfully close friendship. Until the day she died, mom was my hair stylist, though the experience became increasingly frightening due to her shakiness, and the sharpness of her scissors. There was blood. Mom was eighty-three.

Mom was/is my hero, my inspiration. As I was growing up, she was the one who told me I could do whatever was in my heart to do. When I was younger, I had a singing ministry. Kathy and I traveled singing in churches. After several years, I realized that I wasn’t properly providing for my growing family, so I went back to work at the shop. For years, after I had given up on my dream of music ministry, it was mom who often told me, “You were born for more than this.” It was mom’s prayers and the faith she taught me that helped me overcome my fear, and gave me the nerve to launch a new career as an entertainer. That was her greatest Christmas present to me. Now as I think about it, she’s enjoying the greatest of Christmas presents…Christ’s presence.