Christmas Comes But Once

For most of the U.S. it was Nov. 19, a crisp autumn Sunday. For a home in Cheyenne, Wyo. and a pale, three-year-old boy with a freshly barbered cowlick, it was Christmas. Ten doctors had agreed last month that young Forest (“Nubbins”) Hoffman, 22 Ibs., bedridden for more than six weeks with incurable sarcoma of the bladder, would probably not live until Dec. 25.

Cheyenne found out about Nubbins when his father went looking for a Christmas tree. Within a week’s time, newspaper readers across the land were looking at pictures of the thin, flannel-clad child with solemn brown eyes. Then the gifts began to pour in.

The Hoffman closets in the four-room frame house overflowed with packages; they came from Miami, from Seattle, from all over: a xylophone, a miniature church with chimes, a blue music box, a toy army camp. The halls were filled with hand-carved wooden gifts flown from wounded servicemen at Lowry Field, Colo., a wheelbarrow, a tommygun, a family of walking ducks. There was a black cocker spaniel from one of Father Hoffman’s fellow workers at the Union Pacific Railroad, and a tree-size fir branch from the Cheyenne Park Department.

On Saturday, Nubbins’ father had worked in the kitchen, hanging ornaments on the fir branch and answering the side door every time the postman, the delivery boy or the expressman knocked. His mother sat beside the crib in the living room while Nubbins took special pains to be a “good boy”; he rolled over for his nap without argument and listened quietly as Mother read The Night before Christmas.

Next morning Nubbins opened his eyes and said at once: “It’s Christmas!” Ordinarily shy, he gravely shook hands with the neighbor dressed as Santa Claus, appeared at the window to pose for photographers.

He admired each present—beginning with the red toy automobile, the gift of William Jeffers, president of Father’s railroad. But in all the 250-odd gifts and the bushel baskets of letters, and telegrams, nothing was so satisfactory—not even the fuzzy kangaroo—as the presents from his parents, which Nubbins had particularly asked for: the wooden freight train, the toy jeep, the candy-filled locomotive. “It was a Christmas,” said his father, “that little boys dream of.”