College professors may tut-tut about their students’ writing these days, and I like to blame the Microsoft Word program for fostering mediocre grammar skills, but elderly laments about this are nothing new. I remember a particular Christmas Eve day when my father memorably complained about the composition skills of his first-year medical students.

December 24th was generally the day after the practical exam at the University of Maryland Medical School, where my father taught gross anatomy, edited an atlas of anatomy, and did cancer research. On that day my parents would surreptiously stow Santa’s treasures in the trunk of the 1948 two-door Ford and drive up Route 1 from Baltimore to my grandparents’ house near Philadelphia, enjoying the colored lights and singing Stille Nacht, in German, on the way.

But until dusk fell we would spend our time grading those exams – my father, my older sister, and I. That may seem shocking, but from an early age, we helped out. It was like being in retail and living over the store.You mixed business with pleasure, and you did what you could to contribute to the family business. A four-year-old can put handfuls of sawdust in a mouse bowl. A six-year-old can transfer mice from a dirty bowl to a clean bowl.

For the bluebooks, my sister and I, probably ages 10 and 7, were each responsible for one simple question, and our cue cards told how many points to award each of the possible answers. On one of those Christmas Eve days he turned the air blue when he read this answer: “The body is a mechanical mechanism.”

I didn’t really know the meaning of the vocabulary word “redundancy,” but that night I learned to avoid it. It was just one of the life lessons I learned that Christmas Eve. From my mother I learned that nothing is ever too much trouble to do to make loved ones happy — not just making wonderful presents for children, but also making the trips, unfailingly on Christmas, to grandparents.