My most memorable Christmas came in 1955. With the arrival of what I came to call “our Korean Christmas gift.” My little sister wasn’t wrapped in shining paper. Or anything bright and colorful. She came on a jet plane. First to California. Dressed in one of those old-fashioned, paper-thin baby dresses that were common dress for summer infantwear back then. It would have been sized “3 months” if there had been an American manufacturer involved. For Lydia, though almost 15 months old, weighed 14 pounds. She could not even turn over!

It was the dead of winter with beautiful snowflakes falling to decorate the evening when a stewardess walked across the runway carrying this vulnerable baby who had been placed, just the day before, in a sturdy box just large enough for them to call “a bed” and loaded along with scores of other infants and toddlers on a plane without seats. These children were known as “war orphans” because so many of them were fathered by American soldiers who had abandoned their convenient lovers, leaving them and their children destitute and treated like trash, once the war was over.

Somehow my parents had been forewarned that they needed to send an extra change of clothes, something warm, along with a heavier blanket for her arrival. And so she came on a snowy night. With no instructions. To families who knew nothing about the culture and didn’t know the importance of many things that we know now (and are still trying to learn) about caring for such children who come from afar. The thought that they might have a child so fragile that she could die the day she arrived--that was something that apparently never entered my parents’ minds. Nor the agency’s. These children were desperate, and their new parents held high aspirations with little understanding of the issues or challenges ahead.

My mother wrote last week that December 17 always seems like Lydia’s birthday. It was a new beginning for all of us. For this dear child, who would never be able to reconstruct her past as much as she’d like, never be able to find her biological mother, nor the father who tossed her aside for whatever reason and with whatever feelings he might have experienced, this woman who now wonders  how she possibly coped in an orphanage where the kids were forced to live on rice water, it was time to catch up on a lot of things.

I sent her a little Christmas angel this year, with a note telling her that she has so many times been, for me, like an angel in my life. One who came as such a blessing, to a family that had very, very little left to share materially. Yet, paradoxically, we had everything we wanted!