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Have You Looked in Your Front Room

Christmas 1939, St George Utah. It was going to be a lean, disappointing Christmas. Father had served in World War I and suffered from PTSD. He had spent considerable time in the hospital and had been unable to work much that year. Mother had recently given birth to a new baby and was still quite weak. These were depression times and the young family of five lived in a humble two-room house. Notwithstanding these circumstances though, faith was strong. They had family prayer at mealtimes and Mother gathered her three little girls about her every night for their evening prayers.

Paralee had been praying for a doll with “curly hair.” When Christmas morning came the family gathered in the kitchen. They kept the door to the front room closed to preserve precious coal and wood. Paralee said, “I received a “Betsy Wetsy” doll, which was made of rubber, with a molded head, and a miniature baby bottle, not the “doll with curly hair” for which I had been praying.”

Later on that morning, one of the ladies that worked in the primary with Mother knocked at the door. She entered, they visited, and she looked around at what the children had received for Christmas and then asked, “Have you looked in your front room?”

Mother opened the door to the cold front room and there saw a box, put together by the other primary workers. It was filled with toys for the girls, and there on the top was the doll with “curly hair.”

Mother would speak of the Christmas miracle many times in the years that followed, though never “without a few tears.”

As for Paralee, she concludes, “[God] knows what is best for us, and answers prayers quickly, or slowly, or sometimes “no”! For our “Eternal Best Good!”

Source: Paralee Eckman