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My Coat of Many Colors
On Sunday night, my wife and I sat down to watch Dolly Parton’s Christmas Special. Quite honestly, we don’t normally watch a lot of network television. We usually watch movies or episodes of a series on Netflix. Earlier that afternoon, however, I was watching the New York Jets play the Las Vegas Raiders on CBS, and I saw a few commercials for Dolly’s show. When I mentioned the Special later to Barbara, she said, “Let’s watch it,” and so we did. By then, too, I needed a pick-me-up because my Jets had squandered a late lead and lost on a last-second, boneheaded, defensive play. (A blog post, perhaps, for another day.) I definitely needed something positive. Little did I know that one of Dolly’s songs would take me back to a pleasant memory from 50 years earlier, to my own version of that same song.
Dolly’s song tells the story of how when she was young, she needed a new coat for the coming winter, but with 12 children in the family, her mom couldn’t afford to just go out and buy one. As a result, she decided to make a coat for her daughter, something she had done for many of her children. At that point, though, she did not have enough cloth of one color to make a full coat, so, instead, she sifted through a pile of donated rags and fashioned a “Coat of Many Colors” for Dolly.
As Dolly’s mother sewed the material together with love, she told her daughter about a similar coat from…
