Helpmyphysics

I was a boy aged seven at Christmas 1968. I have vivid memories of getting up really early on Christmas morning and my Dad taking me round to Corpus Christi Church Calderbank for the Dawn Mass of Christmas. I was an altar boy and was chosen to serve this Mass of Christmas. The morning was very dark.

In those days Scotland `didn`t celebrate Christmas`. So Dad attended Mass with me before going back home to open our presents while he had to go off to work leaving me, my sister, Mam and our year old brother to our Christmas morning.

I remember the excitement of that Christmas Eve when three Apollo astronauts: Borman, Lovell and Anders were about to go into Moon orbit. This was the first time a spaceship had gone to the moon.

I will always feel the excitement as the news on television broadcast the message these astronauts delivered from the orbit of the moon.

The words from Genesis read by the astronauts still make my neck hairs stand on end.

But it was Jim Lovell who I remember more for his famous reply to the control centre at Houston after the big engine fired to bring the astronauts home to earth.

” Houston. There is a Santa Claus!”