By Judge David Larson, Federal Way Municipal Court

As I experience the holidays, I cannot help but be grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to continue serving you as one of your judges. It is a position I cherish. I accept the responsibility that comes with the title “your honor” because it is a title that I must earn every day.

I wanted to share some holiday thoughts with you as you prepare to celebrate with your friends and family.

My Christmas list shrinks every as I grow older because material things have become far less important to me. The things that matter to me the most in life have become ever-increasingly intangible.

I believe that our children understand the intangibles better than we think. Sometimes it seems that Christmas wish lists are something that our children keep copies of to use as a checklist on Christmas day to make sure that they received everything they asked for. However, I want to share a story with you that I hope illustrates how important intangibles are to our children too.

It was a Christmas in the mid-1990s, when our sons were very young. My wife liked to rock in the chair with the kids on her lap, so I bought her a new rocking chair as one of her gifts. The box the chair came in was big and it was L-shaped.

I remember how much fun I had with the big boxes stuff came in when I was a kid. Of course, I knew that one of the reasons my wife and I had sons was so that I could revert to my own childhood and not look completely foolish. As if in a time machine taking me back to when I was 5 years old, my oldest son and I spent Christmas morning turning this L-shaped box into a Kenworth truck. My youngest son was still a baby at the time, so he was the supervisor in our make believe truck factory.

We cut out windows and doors and used crayons to make a dashboard, taillights, headlights, blinkers, a bumper, a grill and door handles. We used toilet paper tubes as smoke stacks and part of a wire coat hanger as a CB antenna. The truck even had my sons’ first names just below the windows on the doors.

It was no longer just a box; to my 5-year-old son, it was his truck. He would sit in it with his baby brother and I would push the truck around the room. They were a truck driver team. The toys they got for Christmas that cost us money were completely ignored in favor of this simple box. The “truck” lasted as a “toy” for almost a year before it was sent to the scrap heap.

I cannot even remember what we bought our kids that Christmas, but I still remember the box we turned into a truck. It is not about the box, though. It is about the time we spent and the imagination we used to make that simple box into a truck. I have had several such special moments with my sons since then because the story of the Christmas box was never forgotten. The box may have looked empty, but it was full of love.

I am not recommending purchasing big boxes for Christmas, but I hope you see the point of my story. The simple things in life are what really matter.

I hope you are blessed with as many intangible gifts as possible. More importantly, may you give others intangible gifts that will provide you the gift of fond memories for years to come.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.