December 2021 Christmas Holidays Story Contest Entry
A True Christmas Miracle
by Jennifer Sue
The backstory is the author’s autobiography. Most names and places have been changed.
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During the years after WWII the Raven family, while in many ways typical for the era, was anything but normal. The backstory began in the early spring of 1944. Then 20 year old Chuck Raven’s unit had just completed paratrooper training, allowing him to come home on leave before shipping out to Britain. Lorraine Rees, a stubborn and feisty 17 year old high school junior, had been forbidden to go out with a grown man. After arguing and sent to her bedroom, she locked her door and climbed from her bedroom window to the front porch roof, then eased over the edge to shimmy down a porch column to go out with him. Lorraine dropped out of school at the start of her senior year, giving birth to a son, Leroy, in January 1945. Since Chuck had been sent to Europe, a shotgun wedding had been impossible. Chuck’s parents lived on a farm a mile outside the town of Grantsport, 8 2/3 miles north of Reading, where Lorraine lived. When the weather turned warmer in the spring, she’d bundle her baby and walk the mile long dirt road out to the farm so the infant could meet his grandparents, 2 uncles, and a great grandmother.
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This story is 228 words long.
