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"A Simple Christmas"

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The former presidential candidate took a break from politics to bring you a book of heartfelt holiday stories written to highlight the true meaning of Christmas. We talked with Governor Huckabee about A Simple Christmas and what he hopes for our country – and you – in the New Year.
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Jennie Treadway-Miller: Hello, Governor Huckabee. It’s a pleasure to speak with you.

Governor Mike Huckabee: Well thank you. I’m happy to call.

JTM: Let’s jump right in. When you were approached about doing a Christmas book, how did you come to decide to tell personal stories?

GMH: When the publisher called and asked me about doing a Christmas book, I was trying to think through how I’d handle it and sketched out an idea. The publisher loved it and it really unfolded. It was an incredibly positive experience, cathartic and therapeutic in many ways. I tell people that this is my seventh book and easily my favorite. I’m almost a little nervous because I’m enjoying it so much that I hope other people will too. It’s such a different book for me. It’s not political and I’m not putting forth any policies. I want to not only tell the First Christmas Story in a way they’ve not heard it before, but I want to tell personal stories that will make them think of their own stories – the good, the bad and the ugly.

JTM: Some of the chapters must have been harder to write than others, particularly Loneliness, about your Uncle Garvin, Crisis, regarding your wife’s cancer diagnosis, and then Faith, about your father’s passing. How hard was it to take those memories and turn them into something uplifting for readers?

GMH: That was one of the great therapies for me. A lot of things in the book I’ve not talked about. Sitting down and working through and realizing the impact – when I thought about my Uncle Garvin and I really thought about all the things he’d done and how he meant so much to me, but I never put it on the level as telling the story like that. Same thing with my dad. It was something only my sister and I lived through, so nobody else could understand who he was and the impact he had on us. Here is a person who came to faith late in life, but it was real and genuine, and better to have real faith for a portion of your life than a phony one for your entire life. Because when it really counts, as it did when he was dying, his was real and he faced death the way you hope you can yourself. That’s what was so remarkable. I thought, who is this man? He isn’t who I remember when I grew up! But wow – what a great legacy he left me. I’ve always told people that dad didn’t have anything hardly his whole life, but what he left me was better than if he’d left me Warren Buffett’s fortune. I’d rather have what he gave me – the memory of the sacrifice of the guitars and teaching me how to die.

JTM: I love the lesson about how he wasn’t going to let the cancer steal the last time he had left. I thought that was such a great lesson for you and your family.

GMH: Well, I appreciate that. I tried to tell it in a way that we still had moments of levity, how we joked about his last ten “last Christmas’s.” I think there are a lot of families who have a father like that. It all gets very serious all of a sudden and you think – this is the real deal.

JTM: Hope is something that we struggle with the most, especially when it comes to losing a parent, a spouse, a child… You said in the chapter about Hope, that “coming closer to death brings you closer to life.” What do you tell the person who’s about to experience their first Christmas having lost a loved one?

GMH: Christmas can bring out some of our best memories, but the reality is that sometimes it can bring out the most painful ones. The first time you look down at the end of the table and that chair’s empty, the one that’s been occupied your entire life by your dad or your grandfather, that’s when it really hits you. It’s not at their funeral, because you’re numb then. None of the holidays hit you as hard as Christmas because all the family is together and everyone sits in the same chair and do the same thing and the first time you do that without that person, that’s when it really comes crashing in on you. You want to say, “God doesn’t understand how much this hurts,” and that’s when you have to go back to that First Christmas. When He showed up, it wasn’t with all the royalty and attendants. It looked like an unmitigated failure. Unwed pregnant teenage girl, away from home, no place to say, no doctors, no midwives, no Lamaze classes… We have so sanitized the birth of Jesus in our church pageants. That’s the point – there’s no place we ever come to in life where we can say, “But God, you don’t understand. You’ve never known life so rough.” And then we remember the real Bethlehem, and say, “yeah, I guess you do.”

JTM: I read that paragraph to my editor this morning, where you describe the birth of Jesus and say, “Top that, whiners of the world!” and it just made me laugh so hard because it’s true. The story seems so pleasant because we’ve seen it acted out on the church stage so nicely.

GMH: On of the lines my daughter cringed at was, “Silent Night, my foot!” Are you kidding me? Have you ever been in a maternity ward? This isn’t some quiet little lady looking up at heaven hearing the Hallelujah Chorus.

JTM: No one has really actually acted out the labor and delivery of Jesus. She’s pregnant and - voila - then there’s a baby.

GMH: Yeah, how many hours did she go through labor? The idea that she had a different kind of birth would defy the whole point. If she was going to have that kind of birth, she would’ve had Him in a king’s palace. But that wasn’t the point.

JTM: In the chapter about Limitations, I was struck by the remark about your father living in a Depression-era mindset and not going into debt for something he couldn’t afford, which is such an important life lesson.

GMH: Gosh, don’t you wish Congress could learn that lesson?

JTM: Yes! But the holidays have become synonymous with debt, it seems. What would you tell the person who’s charging Christmas presents and over-extending himself, and you get off the tail-end of Christmas and you’re worse?

GMH: I’d say Christmas is not about the What but about the Who. It’s about who you’re going to be with. No one says, “I don’t mind being alone on Christmas as long as I get the latest Gameboy.” No, you want to be surrounded by people who love you and people who you love. We get so caught up in what we get but it’s not about that all. It’s about being connected to our family.

JTM: When you write about your childhood, you paint a very clear picture of how simple it was – being able to play outside in the afternoons without worry and even leaving your front door unlocked. There wasn’t an internet or video games to suck you in. Do you miss that simpler life?

GMH: Oh yeah. My mind takes me back there often. I realize now that I really grew up in Mayberry and I miss it. It was a great time to be a kid. We didn’t think, oh my, you can’t ride your bike because you don’t have a helmet, or you can’t go down the street because there might be predators. There was no internet. I didn’t have to worry about someone trying to scam me or abduct me from an internet conversation. We only had three channels and they were black and white and they were so boring it caused us to go outside. Didn’t worry about obesity because we were lucky to keep us as thin as we were.

JTM: So, when was the last time you ate garbage soup?

GMH: Ha ha! It’s been a while. And when we tell our kids about garbage soup, they look us like, “You’re kidding me!” And at times, I’m thinking, you know, there were tough times in their lifetime, but nothing like what Janet and I started out with. We’ve taken them by the $40-a-month apartment, they look at us like, “You lived in that?” Well, yeah!

JTM: You even say that Christmas is simpler in poverty than in prosperity. There has to be truth in that because you’re not distracted by all the "stuff."

GMH: Those early years were good years because it didn’t take a lot to make us happy. We knew we weren’t going to have 20 gifts under the tree. There wasn’t a long list of things that had to be fulfilled. We knew we’d have a good meal and there’d be a few modest gifts. But it was more about the traditions. What we looked forward to the most was the food we’d know we’d have, the trip out to the woods to get the tree with my dad, my mom and sister making divinity… Those simple things. They were tied to who we were and who we were with.

JTM: In the chapter about Transitions, you tell about the walk you went on with your wife to decide whether or not to change the course of your career. You wrote, “Janet and I decided that if God’s purpose and plan for our lives was to get comfortable, then we had indeed found success.” Some might think – But you were comfortable! Why change that! How do you explain taking that leap of faith?

GMH: I probably couldn’t explain that to somebody who is not a believer. If you’re a person who’s faith is the foundation of your life, you just live with a different frame of reference. Your focus is not the possessions you have, it’s the purpose for which you exist. Don’t get me wrong – if I had the choice to live in poverty or prosperity, I’d choose prosperity every time. But I’ve lived in poverty enough to know that it doesn’t make or break you. Some of the most happy people I know have very little, and some of the most miserable people I know have everything, except peace of mind. What I’ve learned through all of that is the privilege of giving something away is better than the privilege of having it. We’ve been able to give away more – things we never could’ve done before – and it’s the greatest joy we’ve had. But we wouldn’t have known that had we experienced those lean times.

JTM: Right off the bat you said something that caught me. My favorite quote is from the chapter on Patience. It reads: “There are some things in life that are best experienced in their proper season and at the appropriate moment.” Why do you think that is such a hard lesson to learn?

GMH: It goes back to the sin nature – the self-centered nature, that our schedule, our desires and wants are more important than anything else. I always tell people, if you don’t think you have a self-centered nature, next time you take a group photo and get a copy of the photo back, who do you look at first? I mean, if you’re eyes are closed, it’s a terrible picture. But if everybody else looks like they have Halloween masks on but you look fine, you say, “Oh this one will work.” That’s just our basic nature. This idea that I’m not going to wait, it’s like saying, I’m more important than everyone else standing in line. You’re saying your time is more important than my time.

JTM: You continue to write books about the issue of a person’s character. When did you come to realize that character is the foundation of a person’s life and how have you taught this lesson to your children?

GMH: I was fortunate enough to grow up with it. I can remember what my dad used to say. He said things like, “The only thing a poor man has is his word. You lose that, you have nothing. If you have your word, you have everything.” He’d say, “If you work for someone, don’t badmouth who you work for because he’s given you a job. If you think you can get a better job making more money and doing less work, go get it. Until you do, be grateful for the job you have.” He’d say, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember what you said cause you’ll just tell the same thing the next time.” I mean, those are great life lessons.

And my mother drilled into me the Golden Rule – do unto others as you’d have done to you. If I ever did something wrong, getting in a fight on the playground or calling someone a name, she didn’t give me a 30 minute lecture. She’d just say, “Do you want someone calling you a name?” No ma’am. “Then don’t call someone else a name.”

I mean, it’s real simple stuff, but those are the lessons we sometimes miss because we want to give kids some deep, psychological lesson on the inner workings of the human psyche. No, just tell them, look, don’t do something to someone you don’t want done to you.

JTM: Sometimes it seems a politician writes a book for the sake of writing a book, but you obviously enjoy writing and have been a writer and communicator for the bulk of your life. One of our local writers once told me that every writer as a story or two under his bed. Is that the case for you? Are there things you still have in mind to write?

GMH: Writing is something I love to do, and I write every week. I do three radio commentaries a day, five days a week. I write my monologues for the television every weekend, but this book, for me, was very different. There aren’t political or even religious doctrines in it. It was a great creative release for me. I had great pleasure in it. When you get that last chapter into the publisher, you’re just so glad to be done with it and hitting the deadline, that for a few weeks, you don’t want anything to do with it. You’re just so exhausted and you step back. So when I went into the studio to record the audio version in August, you know, Jennie, to be honest, there were a couple of times that I’d start laughing. It was embarrassing. The engineer must’ve thought, geez, you think your own jokes are that funny?

JTM: Yeah, keep it together!

GMH: Right, but you know I was reading it then as objectively as I could. I really thought, you know, I hope people take it as I just did but it really was funny. And there’d be other times I’d read something and I’d have to take a sip of water because I’d be choked up. If people are touched by it as I was looking at it with fresh eyes, then it’ll be an effective book. Whether it’s successful or not, I don’t know. But I’d like it to be effective.

JTM: I hope you take this as a compliment, but your writing style is very Max Lucado-ish. It’s the way you tell a story and the way you describe the setting and how it felt, it was a real pleasure and joy to read. It feels like I know you and I’ve never met you. You have a real talent for storytelling. I admire that, just being a writer myself.

GMH: By mentioning Max Lucado in the same sentence as me, you’ve given me the highest compliment. He’s a magnificent writer.

JTM: So tell me about a holiday tradition for the Huckabee family.

GMH: We still put the hat on the Christmas tree and still eat Chinese food on Christmas Eve after the service at church. When we finish the Chinese food, we get together with our immediate family, my wife, me and our kids, and now the daughter-in-law and soon to be son-in-law. Christmas morning it’s been our tradition to go to Janet’s mother’s house in Hope and celebrate with her family. Now this year has been tough because she’s not doing well, so we’re not sure how it’ll all work out. And quite frankly, this will be the last Christmas we had with her. But that, too, is part of the transition of life.

JTM: Lastly, what do you hope for in 2010 – for this country, its people, and for your family? When you think about next year, what’s on your mind?

GMH: I hope people will adopt a philosophy I’ve had since I was a young man, which is take God more seriously and take yourself less seriously. I think we tend to do the opposite. We act like it’s all about our wants and needs. It really isn’t all about us.

JTM: I so appreciate you calling me. I’ve been sitting here thinking about it for the last hour and I’m so pleased to have talked with you.

GMH: It’s been a pleasure, Jennie, and I’m so glad you read the book. It’s kind of refreshing to do an interview with someone who actually read the book. Most people, if they’re forced to do an interview, they might at best read what the publisher sent or just the book jacket.

JTM: No, no, I wanted to.

GMH: Well that means a lot. Thank you.

JTM: I wish I could be here to meet you when you’re here at Thanksgiving, and then you could sign my book, but I’ll be home with family in Tennessee.

GMH: I would be glad to do it, Jennie, but you’ll be exactly where you need to be. I hope you have a great time with your family.

JTM: Thank you. Enjoy your book tour!

GMH: Thanks, goodbye.

JTM: Bye.

For more information on Governor Mick Huckabee, please visit his website.

by Jennie Treadway-Miller

Jennie was a columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press for eight years prior to moving to Amarillo in 2008. She is an avid reader, runner and writer.

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