LAFAYETTE, La. — His name is David Fisher. He is 95-years-old, but his memories of Christmas, and why it's so important, continue to ring true.
"Gifts and presents and gatherings and stuff… I'm not saying Christ is overlooked, but sometimes you worry about it taking center stage to the reality of stuff," said Fisher.
He says it's remembering the Christ part of Christmas.
David Fisher, Sr., is a very impressive 95 year old. He and his amazing late wife Shirley had seven kids, a group that has grown into grandkids. great kids and even a great-great grandkid.
Christmas at his house in Lafayette? Is quite an experience.
"It's not bedlam because it's enjoyable, but when you get seven kids and all of that, boyfriends and girlfriends and uncles and aunts and all of that, it gets to be quite a thing," he said.
Before that extended family reached our planet, we go back to the late 1920's, where Fisher - as a child in Evangeline, Louisiana - received a most memorable Christmas present.
"So one of my aunts bought me a threshing machine," he said. "It would blow like a real thresher. That's the first gift I remember getting."
He's had an amazing career as an athlete at the Southwestern Louisiana Institute (which is the University of Louisiana at Lafayette today) in the 1940's and 1950's to a coach in Jennings, then an administrator at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (which is also UL Lafayette today).
But to go full circle, today's Spirit is about one of my heroes - David fisher - and his thoughts about nearly 10 decades of Christmases. It does indeed all come back to Christ, and the word, "family."
"I guess what you look forward to is you see the pleasure that your children or grandchildren or great grandchildren, and it just renews the feeling that you have about Christmas," he says.
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