Digital Sports Desk

A Collection of Memorable Christmas Columns

By TERRY LYONS , (With a Little Help from My Friends)

BOSTON – Merry Christmas ‘25 to all who celebrate the day. To others, this columnist wishes you sincere best wishes and joy for 2026 with peace during the holiday(s) you celebrate and for the entire year ahead.

In what has now been classified as a full-fledged tradition, here’s my annual salute to Christmas morning and the twinkle of a young boy’s eyes written by my great friend, Shelby Strother:

Longtime readers of my column and previous TL Blog will remember the reprint of this column by Shelby Strother of the Detroit News. It’s a keeper and really hits home as I remember trading the basketballs, baseballs and footballs in for a typewriter and a Mylec Air Flow hockey stick. The column, along with dozens of others, is included in Saddlebags, a collection of Shelby’s favorites and his best from a career that spanned from Satellite Beach, Florida / Florida Today to the Denver Post to the Detroit News.

I’ve read this column at least a thousand times and enjoy it the same each and every time I read it. Here’s hoping you do too.

After all, “Sometimes the gift is simply the freedom to imagine. There may be no greater one.”

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Each Christmas Day Contains the Past, Present and Future

By SHELBY STROTHER

It did not matter that the wind-chill was life threatening. It was Christmas morning, and a bright sun stabbed the frozen land. And children were playing.

The decision over which to play with – the official World Cup soccer ball or the Turbo Football – never materialized. With all the snow, a soccer match was out of the question. So spirals of pink and black performed in the most sincere imitations of Rodney Peete and Joe Montana floated back and forth in the yard.

What a nice sight.

The Annual Second Chance is near – it’s called New Year’s Eve. It is the window of opportunity where the hopes and fears of all the year (not to mention the mistakes) can be erased.

But Christmas Day is a time of reinforcement and the essence of tomorrow. And children playing with toys are the finest examples of what that tomorrow looks like.

I look out the window. I’ve been in that yard. All youngsters have. Sports become such a part of childhood. Santa is aware of all of this, naturally.

This particular day is exquisite, I think to myself. I take personal inventory, not only of blessings and personal satisfaction, but of the presents of Christmas past. Still the kid, I suppose.

I got my first basketball when I was six. I made my first basket a year later. There was a tetherball set; I must have been eight. And a football helmet when I was ten. A Carl Furillo model baseball mitt at eleven. There were tennis rackets and fishing poles and boxing gloves and shrimp nets and a Mickey Mantle 32-inch Little League bat and one time, even a badminton set.

Every Christmas, I’d play out my dreams and my mind would fly over the rainbow, imagining my propulsion. Of course, I would become a major-leaguer, an All-Star, an all-time great, a Hall of Famer. We all would. My vision extended well beyond the day.

My athletic ability, alas, never kept stride. It was not the worst realization I would ever make.

But I have noticed a direct correlation between Christmas gifts and sporting dreams. The dreams are for the young. So are the gifts. Usually, the two disappear in unison. The rare few who project into greatness discover they do not need imagination to make those lofty flights of fantasy. Hope is not the co-pilot. Expectation is.

It must be a wonderful view.

I was thinking about all of this when another memory nudged me. My 17th Christmas I got a typewriter.

It was about the same time that I’d maneuvered my fantasy a few extra miles. I’d received a baseball scholarship to pitch at a small school in Florida. There were other opportunities, other colleges available. But none that would allow my athletic vision to continue.

I had expected a Christmas of more games in the yard. More dreams to celebrate. I got a typewriter instead.

“What am I going to do with a typewriter?” I asked.

My mother said I’d need it for college. But she also said, “Sometimes you get too old to play games. But you never get too old that you can’t use your imagination.”

Sometimes Christmas is taken for granted. Almost always, in fact. I think Christmas music, and I hear bells. I turn on the radio and I hear someone named Elmo and Patsy lamenting their grandmother’s head-on collision with a reindeer. I think of the meaning of Christmas, and I think of the most special birthday in the history of the world. But I turn on the TV and there are all these claymation raisins doing Doo-Wop homages to the joys of buying machines wherein a microchip can seize command of entire generations.

Christmas (will soon) be gone, 364 days to go. But children still play. They chase the wonderful image of themselves as they would like to be seen. Christmas is their favorite arena. But they settle for lesser stadia.

But remember this – the present is sometimes confused with the package it comes wrapped in. Sometimes the gift is simply the freedom to imagine. There may be no greater one.

It was a great typewriter. I still play with it.

– A column by Shelby Strother

*This column is, by far, my favorite column of all-time. Here’s to the late Shelby Strother, his great wife, Kim, and a Merry Christmas to all.

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Background and Editorial Note: For those of you who did not know Shelby Strother, I pass these little tidbits along:

He was a very good friend. I’ve lost a mother, a father and an older brother. I’ve agonized and felt helpless as we’ve all watched close relatives and friends of the family pass away, but Shelby was the first good friend in my life who went and got cancer and then died. Sadly, as the years pass, many others have fallen to cancer and now to this terrible COVID-19 disease. One of my best friends in life, my goalkeeper, Bob Rose, passed away from Prostate cancer few years ago and our dear friend, Mike Shalin, fellow transplanted New Yorker in Boston, sportswriter and official MLB scorekeeper at Fenway Park,passed away from brain cancer just five years ago. The bottom line – CANCER SUCKS.

Back to Shelby… I can remember when we attended the 1991 NBA All-Star Game in Charlotte, NC. That Sunday night, he said that he didn’t feel well and was going to bed early. Shelby and I always got together on the Sunday night of the NBA All-Star Weekend, as the event was finally in the rearview mirror and we could relax. That was Feb. 10, 1991. The next month was a bad dream, each minute of every day for a solid month. Shelby died in the suburbs of Detroit on March 3, 1991, leaving his wife, Kim and two great little guys, Tommy and Kenny (the latter joined Shelby in heaven a few years back but that is a terrible fact of life to be told another day). Shelby grew up in the great State of Florida and loved it. I met him when he was a writer for the Denver Post. He went on to be a sports columnist for the Detroit News, but when big news – not sporting – was breaking and the News needed a writer, they sent Shelby. When the Berlin Wall was coming down, off went Shelby. … I could go on.

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Then, there’s Boston’s Joe Fitzgerald, a columnist I knew from the Celtics’ glory days but did not know very well which is my loss. Joe wrote for the Boston Herald which was the Herald-American at one point and probably a multi-merger publication over the years, going up against the mighty Boston Globe.

Joe could crank a column with the best of them, and was well-liked in New England as he was an old school newspaperman and wrote like it.

Here’s a couple examples, the first a favorite of my friend and business partner, John Caron, he of West End Johnnies.

By JOE FITZGERALD, Boston Herald

Larry Bird, out of a Celtics uniform since 1992, left a ton of memories at this address, but none more poignant than a Christmas memory he shared with several hundred Boston school kids, repeated here this morning because, quite frankly, sports could use a dose of reality.

“What kills me about Christmas,” he said, “is that while it’s a time of excitement for some people, it’s a time that makes other people sad, like kids who just can’t have the things they see their friends getting. A lot of people – and I know people like this – can’t wait for Christmas to be gone.

“You know how they say it was the Grinch who stole Christmas? It wasn’t the Grinch at all. It was the rich people. They’re the ones who’ve stolen it, buying everything they can for their kids and not worrying about other kids who are going to end up feeling left out. They’ve taken Christmas the wrong way. I mean, it’s supposed to be a time for letting people know how you feel about them, isn’t it?

“That’s why, next to family, the most important thing in my life today are the old friends I have back home, the guys I went to school with, the guys who look at me and don’t see money, or the cars, or even the Celtics. They couldn’t care less about all of that. They live in a different world, the world I came from, where old buddies are still buddies ‘cuz they know what’s important, and it sure ain’t money.

“I look at my little brother today, and when I see him wanting Reeboks, or Champion shirts, it bothers me because kids don’t realize fads and fashions aren’t what determine how good you are, or how important you are.

“Whenever I’m out speaking to a bunch of kids, maybe doing a playground clinic, I always look for that one who stands off by himself, whose clothes don’t look too good. I’ll go out of my way to make a big deal over him because I used to be that kid.

“We got mostly clothes at our house every Christmas, ‘cuz that’s what we needed. I can remember my friends getting bicycles, and thinking how I’d buy the best bike in town if only I had the money. But that just wasn’t possible. Still, my Mom did a good job. Christmas was a big thing around our house. There was always a pile of five or six gifts for all of us; as soon as you opened one, you went right to the next one. It was chaos, and even though we knew it wasn’t going to be a lot, we appreciated how tough it was for our folks to get us what they did.

“So I’ll tell you what we did one year. We knew there’d be no toys that year because the funds just weren’t there. My older brother got the rest of us together and said, ‘Let’s do something special for Mom and Dad before we open our presents. Let’s just tell ’em we love ’em and see how they react, OK? I’ll do the speaking.’

“You’ve got to understand, ‘love’ wasn’t a word we threw around much in our family, so just hearing it said that way was new to me.

“Anyway, we’re all sitting around the tree and my brother stands up. He says, ‘Mom, Dad;  We want to say something to you tonight. We want to tell you we appreciate all you do for us, giving us things we know you had to work overtime to get. And, we just want to tell you we love you.’

“Well, I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Gee, that’s a pretty strong statement,’ when I saw tears coming from my mother’s eyes – and my Dad, he just sat there so proud. You could tell it really hit a chord.

“So look, if you guys want to do something really special this Christmas, tell your parents you love ’em, OK? Tell ’em thanks for all their hard work.

“That’s all I really came here to tell you. Thanks for listening. Good luck to every one of you, and Merry Christmas.”

– Larry Bird

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Then, there’s this 2017 column a story I read for the first time this Christmas Eve ’25:

By JOE FITZGERALD

BOSTON – (Boston Herald | December 23, 2017) – If you’ve ever wondered whether God has a sense of humor, especially in these stridently secular times, consider the ever-present Christmas wreath which continues to be welcomed in places — condos, public classrooms, municipal properties — where most other symbols of Christ’s birth have been regrettably banned by neurotic secularists.

But wreaths, they tell us, are OK.

Why? Because they bear no bothersome reminders of what the holiday is all about. They’re pretty ornaments, that’s all.

You might even say they’re politically correct, if you’re that desperate for attention.

Though truth be told, there was never much thought given to it here until a column fell into this writer’s lap in 1999, three weeks before Christmas, the morning after six Worcester firefighters perished while trying to knock down a warehouse inferno.

Sometimes, in a job like this, you simply get to hold the pen, which is exactly what happened when a call was made to Our Lady of the Rosary, the church where weary firefighters had gathered for breaks throughout the night.

Father Bill Sanders happened to pick up the phone and said he was sorry not to have the information the caller was seeking.

“Father, while I have you,” the caller went on, “perhaps you can help me figure out something I saw this morning. I watched a firefighter draping black bunting over wreaths that adorned his station’s three bays. I know there was a column in that poignant scene, but I can’t find it. Can you?”

Sanders paused a moment, then asked, “Do you know why we use wreaths at Christmas?”

The writer had to admit he’d never given it much thought.

“Well, they’re in the form of a circle,” Sanders noted. “No beginning. No end. And we make them out of evergreens: ever green, always alive. When you put it all together, isn’t that the message of Christmas, that God sent His only son so that we would not perish but have everlasting life?”

But this insightful priest was far from done.

“Tell me,” he went on, “did that firefighter remove the wreaths before hanging the bunting, or did he cover those wreaths with the bunting?”

He was told the wreaths were not removed.

“Then here’s what I think your column might be,” he continued. “Behind all the sorrow and grief this world may throw at us, and behind all the heartache represented by that bunting, the hope and promise of Christmas remains. I think that’s your column, Joe.”

Indeed it was, and it continues to be shared.

So the next time you see a festive wreath, think of what it represents and remember what it has to say.

Who knows, you might even hear it whisper, “Merry Christmas!”

Wouldn’t that be something?

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Parting Words & Music

A tribute to John Lennon:

“So this is Christmas and what have you done?
Another year over, a new one just begun.

And so this is Christmas, I hope you have fun,
The near and the dear one
The old and the young

A very merry Christmas
And a happy new year,
Let’s hope it’s a good one
Without any fear

And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong,
(War is over if you want it)
For the rich and the poor ones,
The road is so long.
(War is over now)

And so happy Christmas for black and for whites,
(War is over if you want it)
For the yellow and red ones,
Let’s stop all the fight.
(War is over now)

A very merry Christmas
And a happy new year
Let’s hope it’s a good one
Without any fear

And so this is Christmas
And what have we done?
(War is over if you want it)
Another year over,
A new one just begun.
(War is over if you want it)

And so this is Christmas,
We hope you have fun
(War is over if you want it)
The near and the dear one,
The old and the young
(War is over now)

A very merry Christmas
And a Happy New Year,
Let’s hope it’s a good one
Without any fear

War is over
If you want it
War is over now”

Happy Christmas!

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While We’re Young (Ideas) is a weekly (every weekend) collection of Sports Notes and News written by Terry Lyons. The posting of each notebook harkens back to the days when you’d walk over to the city newsstand on Saturday night around 10pm to pick-up a copy of the Sunday papers. Inside, just waiting, was a sports-filled compilation of interesting notes, quotes and quips in a column that always sold a few newspapers. Here, I make an attempt at continuing that tradition – via the magic of e-mail.

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