Here's my very own, homemade Christmas card for you and your family at Christmas time.

One of my earliest Christmas morning memories, I think I was less than six years old, was getting an electric train for Christmas. I came into the living room early that Christmas morning, the only lights, were on the tree, catchlights in my boyish wide eyes and the headlamp of that little Marx train engine circling the tree in the near dark. It was definitely a warm fuzzy Cracker Barrel moment, complete with logs crackling in the fireplace.

The down side of it was that my dad and my uncle spent much of the morning, down on the floor playing with the train and I couldn't play with it. They were country boys who grew up in rural Tennessee, without electricity and had never had an electric train. That train engine was the same vivid red color as the car in the picture. It had a little brass sign on the streamlined steam engine with the same curves as the car that said "Commodore Vanderbilt." It's not lost on me that Vanderbilt University here in Nashville bears his name. Ah, the stuff of family legends.

The good side of the memory that morning is that it's a lifetime touchstone for me that always brings back the memory of family and connections with family and friends.

I hope all of us have those special memories of a Norman Rockwell-esque experience with our families. It doesn't get any better than that.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good life.