Current mood:	nostalgic
Current music:	"I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus"

A Christmas Eve like no other
Thanks to the yearly repetition of family traditions, one Christmas Eve generally blends into another in my memory. Ours usually includes the early evening church service at Holy Trinity Episcopal, the neighborhood lighting of the luminaries in front of the house, a family supper at a nearby Waffle House, the reading by one member of the family of Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” and then a couple of hours of playing the board game Carom. A nice family evening.

But there’s one Christmas Eve that stands out in my memory above all others, and it took place 40 years ago tonight, when astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders beamed live TV pictures of the moon’s surface back to Earth from their Apollo 8 spacecraft in lunar orbit.

Even for a space junkie like I was back in the 1960s heyday of NASA’S manned spaceflight program, Apollo 8 was a special mission — the first time ever that man traveled in outer space beyond Earth’s orbit, the first close-up TV shots of the lunar surface. And thanks to the miracles of modern science, we could sit in our homes and watch it all on our TV sets.

That Christmas Eve telecast from the moon when I was 16 years old has a rightful place as one of the most historic and memorable broadcasts of all time, as the three astronauts first described the craters and valleys and mountains that made up the stark black-and-white moonscape below them and then, in a surprise NASA didn’t know about in advance, proceeded to take turns reading the first dozen lines from the King James version of Genesis in the Bible. When Anders read those first words, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth” while we were seeing the primeval setting below him … well, it made chills run down my spine.

Borman closed out the broadcast “with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.”

Then came one of those globally shared tense moments that the astronauts of NASA provided more than their share of in those days, as the Apollo 8 moved to the dark side of the moon, and out of radio contact with Earth, on their final orbit around the white orb. While out of touch, they would fire the engine that would propel them out of lunar orbit and on their way back home — if everything went well. If it didn’t, they’d be stuck up there … and die. If we didn’t hear from them by about 12:34 a.m. on Christmas morning, we’d know something had gone amiss with the rocket burn.

Everyone else in the family had gone to bed, anticipating the typically early Christmas rising in our household (where my brothers were known to get up as early as 4 in the morning to see what had been left under the tree). But my Dad and I couldn’t tear ourselves away from the TV in the downstairs den. We watched and waited as the TV commentators — I can’t recall for sure which network we were watching, but it might have been Jules Bergman on ABC — filled air time by running down the dire consequences if the burn didn’t go well. The wait seemed interminable.

Then it was time, and the capsule communicator in Houston started calling out: “Apollo 8, Houston …” waiting a few seconds and then trying again, “Apollo 8, Houston …. Apollo 8, Houston …”

Finally, Lovell’s voice answered: “Houston, Apollo 8. Please be informed, there is a Santa Claus.”

One of those moments you never forget.

It had been a tough year, 1968, what with the Vietnam War, the assassinations of MLK and RFK, the rioting, the election of Tricky Dick. But as Robert Zimmerman wrote in his book “Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8,” that successful flight to the moon and back “put a positive, life-affirming exclamation point on what had been an ugly, violent year.”

Forty years later, I still get chillbumps thinking about it.

A very merry Christmas to you all.

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