“Little Johnny and the sad Christmas”

Once upon a time when Little Johnny was about six or seven, he had a very sad Christmas.

Johnny and his family had their last Christmas in their house at 400 West Alden Street in Valdosta, because they were moving to Adel so Daddy could buy the newspaper there. They had a really nice Christmas day and Johnny and his brothers and his sister got some nice toys and had a fun day with the family.

Johnny was really happy, because he got the beautiful Golden Trumpet that he had been wanting for a long time from Santa that morning. It was not a real trumpet, it was just a plastic toy, but it looked like a real trumpet and he could play it like a trumpet.

But just a few days after Christmas, the family packed up all their things and started moving to Adel. They moved all the furniture, including the beds, but they left their clothes and most of their toys all packed up in boxes in the house. Since they didn’t have beds, they spent the night with their friends, the Hamils, and they were going to come back to the house the next day and get all the boxes and finish moving to Adel.

But during the night, they got a phone call from the fire department. The house had caught on fire during the night. The fire department came and put out the fire before everything was burned up, but it got really hot and smokey in the house and a lot of their things were ruined.

One of the things that got ruined was Johnny’s new Golden Trumpet. He was walking around in the smokey-smelling blackened house when he found it, in the box all melted and not even golden any more. He was so sad that even though he was a big boy now, he started crying.

He saw that Mommy was crying too, because her favorite two paintings, Pinky and Blue Boy, were all blackened and wrecked by the smoke and the fire.

Most of their clothes were burned or so smokey they couldn’t keep them, so they had move to Adel with no change of clothes. But all the people in the church in Adel were very kind to them and brought clothes so that everyone had more clothes for the next week.

But nothing replaced that sweet little Golden Trumpet for Johnny, and he always remembered how sad it looked, all melted and wrecked that morning after the fire.