A phrase I remember most of all from my mother is “Don't forget the real reason why we have Christmas.” In Lil' Bit's Heart of Christmas there is a song that my wife wrote as a children's lullaby. I added a Christmas chorus, thinking about a mockingbird in an olive tree outside the stable where Jesus was born, and that's how the bird learned to sing his song.
Sara Hickman recorded it in 2001 and retitled it “The Reason We Have Christmas in the World.”

Christmas Eve 1975 was the first together for my wife and me. A child ran away from the Denton orphanage across the street from where we lived. It was a tense few hours, as the weather was going to be freezing, but the child was found safe. The origins of Lil' Bit go back to a green hobo Top Hat on a 6-foot-2 leprechaun, while having coffee in Tiny Naylor's Westwood (L.A.), California coffee shop. I drew comics of this kid for free meals and signed my pen name, “Billy James Cameron,” at the bottom of each. I thought it should say a “lil' bit” more than Peanuts: Why not have internationally diverse kids facing everyday conflicts without words, only the silence of their facial expressions, about what matters most in their world?

I parked cars back then, in 1970. One tenant saw my poetry, lyrics, and cartoon stuff and advised me to write a Christmas tale. His name was Mr. Jerome Kern. That same holiday season, I cut off the top of a penthouse tenant's Christmas tree, which otherwise wouldn't fit. I took the remnant downstairs, poked it into a Coca-Cola bottle, and wrote a one-page lyric prose-poem of a child runaway finding such a treetop cut off and discarded. When poked in the ground of a secret and sacred hideout behind bushes beside a church steeple wall, it magically grows into fullness and becomes brightly decorated. I gave a copy of it as a gift to each tenant who tipped me. One lady, “Dotty Stern,” read it and wept. She and her escort asked permission to show it to their friend, Charles Schulz.

This was back in 1970. I didn't get Lil' Bit published untill 2002, although my unpublished manuscripts were copyrighted into the Library of Congress in 1999 and 2000.

Return to the 2008 Gift Edition page.