It's the most wonderful time of the year – and in this special feature story from THN's Dec. 22, 1995 edition, legendary hockey writer Jack Falla penned a heartwarming tale that cuts directly to the heart of what Christmas is all about.

The Hockey News has been home for many a great writer, including Massachusetts-area columnist Jack Falla. In this feature story from THN’s Dec. 22, 1995 edition (Vol. 49, Issue 15), Falla wrote a compelling tale about the mother of a Boston College player and alternate U.S. Olympian, and the true heart of Christmas.

(And here’s your holiday reminder – for complete access to THN’s exclusive 76-year Archive, you can subscribe to the magazine.)

Normally, in this paragraph, we’d tell you more about the story below, but in this case, it’s just better for you to scroll down and enjoy Falla’s typically great writing style and content. Falla passed away in 2008, but he’s left hockey and book fans with a wonderful trove of tales about the game and the people involved in it. Enjoy this special Christmas story, and on behalf of all of us at THN, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you and yours.

A ROUTE STRAIGHT TO THE HEART OF CHRISTMAS

Vol. 49, No. 15, Dec. 22, 1995

By Jack Falla

Mrs. Saltmarsh was the last of the 53 customers on my morning paper route in the early 1960s. She lived on the side of a huge hill and delivery of her Boston Globe took a prodigious throw - my viciously back-spinning reverse-helicopter-underhand-bounce-off-the-door-and-die-on-the-welcome-mat special - up a flight of concrete stairs, under a rose arbor and up a second flight of stairs.

Since I estimated my career completion percentage at .973, it was only right, I thought, that Mrs. Saltmarsh was among my more generous tippers.

So I was more than a little miffed on that Saturday before Christmas when I collected for my route and, as was the custom then, received tips that were triple and quadruple the usual amounts from most of my customers, but received only the normal weekly payment from Mrs. Saltmarsh.

I was not overflowing with the spirit of the season when, before dawn on Christmas Eve day, I stood at the bottom of those steps drawing back my arm and cocking my wrist for yet another viciously back-spinning reverse-helicopter etc., and, looking up, saw that Mrs. Saltmarsh’s porch door was closed.

This meant I had to trudge up those narrow crooked stairs and hand-deliver the paper when all I really wanted to do was finish my route and run across Mrs. Saltmarsh’s side lawn and up into the woods to see if the recent streak of cold nights had left Long Pond safe enough to skate on.

At the top of the stairs, Mrs. Saltmarsh caught me with my head down. I was reaching for the doorknob when the door flew open and there, framed in the doorway, was Mrs. Saltmarsh herself.

She was an elderly woman, erect and patrician, and had in her manner what I think the military calls, “a knack of command,” thus I never thought of refusing when she said that, since school was closed, I simply had to come in out of the cold and have some breakfast. As I sat at the table and she stood at the stove, we talked about the only thing we had in common - hockey.

Her son ‘Whip’ had been a star at Boston College and an alternate on the 1956 U.S. Olympic team. She knew I played on a local team and she let me babble on about our season while she pretended to be interested. Or maybe she was interested. With ladies like Mrs. Saltmarsh, you can never tell.

I was probably mid-babble when Mrs. Saltmarsh placed a second stack of pancakes in front of me and disappeared into the parlor.

She was back in a minute, a book in her hand. “I’d like you to have this,” she said, handing me one of the first editions of Lloyd Percival’s now classic, The Hockey Handbook. The book was not gift wrapped so I opened it and there was a photo of a wild-eyed Rocket Richard skating in a rink surrounded not with glass, but with cyclone fencing.

There were pages of play diagrams and, as I would learn later, instructional prose written in a personal and sometimes wry style, e.g. “Though you cannot help admire the player who, in spite of his lack of size and weight, plays a rugged body contact style of game, you cannot hold the same admiration for his intelligence.”

The book was a perfect Christmas gift, a celebration of the narrowest thread of common ground between giver and receiver. It would be a preface to my better understanding of a game I’d come to love, but not yet know. The tips from other customers were quickly spent. But today, four decades later, I still have the book Mrs. Saltmarsh gave me - end bookcase, bottom shelf, six volumes from the right. No tangible Christmas gift has lasted longer.

Finishing my pancakes and wishing Mrs. Saltmarsh a Merry Christmas, I dropped the book in my canvas newspaper bag and headed into the woods to check the ice. Long Pond was frozen thick enough to play hockey on. Its black and unscarred surface, stretching out under the brightening dome of an early morning sky was, like Christmas Eve itself, all preface and possibility, ready to be whatever we would make it.

I would like to close this Christmas column by sending all of you in the hockey community a message written by the late E. B. White in The New Yorker in December, 1952:

“We greet all skaters on small natural ponds at the edge of the woods toward the end of afternoon. Merry Christmas, skaters! Ring, steel! Grow red, sky! Die down, wind! Merry Christmas to all and to all a good morrow.”

And may we go through 1996 with our heads up, our sticks down and our hearts open. 

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