“I Need Nothing Else” Liahona, Dec. 2025.
Latter-day Saint Voices
I Need Nothing Else
My mother had nothing as a child, but she had everything that mattered by the time she passed away.
Illustration by Caitlin Droubay
In December when my mother was nine years old, her stepfather left the family to look for work. He left my grandmother, my mother, and my mother’s younger brother with no money, no food, no Christmas tree, no presents. In Mom’s words, “We had nothing.”
My mother went for a walk that Christmas Eve. She recalled looking through the window of a neighboring home and seeing happy, smiling children surrounding a Christmas tree, with presents and family members close by. Mom wept as she shared that memory before Christmas a few years before she passed away. It was one of many Christmases she had nothing.
Fast forward to 1969, 14 years after my parents had married. We were living in a small town in central California, USA. That’s where two full-time missionaries knocked on our door and brought us the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. A year later, my parents were sealed to each other in the Oakland California Temple, and my two brothers and I were sealed to them.
For my parents, years of discipleship followed, including serving in many Church callings, ministering to countless others, strengthening their testimonies on a mission to Florida, rejoicing in their growing posterity, and basking in the blessings that come from “joy in Jesus Christ” and membership in “the church of joy.”
Shortly after my father died in 2018, my mother wrote a Christmas letter to her children, listing the blessings that had made her life full and rich.
“When I have quiet moments, thoughts and memories come to me—what I have been given,” she wrote. Among the gifts she had received, she named “a husband everlasting” and a family that can be together forever in the presence of the Father and the Son; the restored gospel; living prophets and apostles; latter-day scriptures; the gift of the Holy Ghost; a testimony of the Savior Jesus Christ; and “this special time to celebrate His birth.”
When my mother was a child, she had nothing. By the time she passed away, she had everything that mattered.
“You and the gospel are my life,” she concluded. “I need nothing else. Merry Christmas. Love you forever.”