Christmas, Redux

Christmas, Redux

The wife and I had agreed to limit our spending on Christmas presents to each other this year. The economy was suffering, everyone was a little scared about the future and we were reluctant to spend a wad on gifts when we might feel a bit more comfortable hanging on to some of the dough instead. So here I was wandering around the local K Mart, comparing prices and sizes and making a selection or two when the numbers and her needs coincided. She'd definitely have some gifts to open on this coming Christmas morning – maybe a few less than last year, but enough to warrant getting out of bed that morning. Some would be expected – she'd given me a list of items to consider that she'd like to have along with sizes, colors, etc. Others might be a bit of a surprise to her. I hate to be predictable all of the time. I then drove to Walmart and perused their shelves also. A few more items looked like good bets, so I tossed them into the cart. I checked my pockets for the cash I'd alloted for her gifts – not too much left. I then had an idea, so I drove to another store nearby. They had exactly what I was looking for and it ended up being the last gift I'd have to buy.

It was 4 days before Christmas. Probably the latest I'd ever gone gift shopping. But, then again, this year was a bit different.

My wife had injured one of her legs mid-November and it had taken her a long while to recover. There had been over a week of bed rest involved with a lot of heating-pad duty, then a rented walker utilized for a while, finally the purchase of a walking cane to aid her perambulations. I had to take on some of her household duties while she was laid up and they took up time that would have normally been utilized for Yuletide prep. She was coming along quite nicely now, thank goodness, but her convalescence had thrown our holiday timetable off by quite a while. She'd mostly recovered in time to do some abbreviated Christmas cookie baking for a few of our closer relatives using a stool in the kitchen as an aid where she could sit and rest her leg between batches. She had also done some of her gift shopping from the seat of an electric cart in a couple of our local big box stores.

When I was a youngster I used to smile when my folks would remark on how fast Christmas was approaching, how it seemed to sneak up on them when they weren't looking. I knew it surely wasn't that way with us kids! Oh, no! To my brothers and I, Christmas was a stubborn mule, a holiday that dug its recalcitrant hooves into the ground and took its sweet jolly old time coming around. It seemed like a lifetime from Halloween to Christmas and, totally against logic, even longer than that from Thanksgiving to Christmas.

And the last week before the holiday? Excruciating!

'Tain't that way no more, McGee. Uh-uh! Now we can understand what our folks used to tell us about Christmas coming fast. Holy smoke, does it ever come fast now! You seem to barely have time to clear your throat and holler “slow down!” between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Doesn't do any good, though. It still comes at ya like a bolt of lightning.

I can still recall the scratchy red wool blankets that were on the bed that my brother and I shared when we were kids. On Christmas Eve we'd lay there in the dark, waiting, poking each other, giggling and bouncing around on the bed. I suppose we would eventually go to sleep, but that didn't actually occur until we'd been warned a number of times from downstairs that if we didn't “knock it off up there and go to sleep” there'd be NO Christmas for us. We'd finally quiet down and drift off sometime in the wee hours.

I can still remember one Christmas Eve night when I distinctly heard sleigh bells outside the window of our bedroom. No doubt in my mind, then or now – doggone sleigh bells. Neighbors? Our folks? A jolly old elf? I was open to all possibilities then and definitely leaning toward the Santa option.

And who really knows what I'd heard?

My brother'd usually wake up first. He was always more excitable than I and a much lighter sleeper. My folks would make us wait in our bedroom before allowing us to come downstairs. During this unbearable quarantine, my father would drive over to my grandmother's house and bring her back to ours. She always shared Christmas morning with us as my grandfather had passed away when I was six and mom wouldn't think of leaving her alone.

That was just the way it was in those days.

When all was ready we were allowed to come downstairs and open our gifts.

My family didn't have a lot of money, but mom always believed in a big Christmas, so dad had little choice in the matter. I wonder, now that I'm an adult, how long it took him to pay off our Christmas bills in those years. Probably into the late spring, I'd guess.

Us kids would whoop and holler as we opened gift after gift, the wrapping paper, ribbons and bows making drifts and windrows along the furniture as the unopened gift pile dwindled. Each unopened gift that lay in our laps was a universe of possibilities. Was it another toy? A game? Something else to play with? Or the clothes that our parents thought were so important. Soon the unwrapping was completed and we sat back and contemplated our haul. It was always too much, of course. Mom wanted it that way. And we kids didn't know any better – we thought it was that way everywhere. Mom and Gram and Dad quietly exchanged gifts then and exclaimed their surprise and satisfaction as each one was opened.

Those were good years.

Nowadays things are a bit smaller and a bit quieter. Its just my wife, my adult son and myself. My only sadness about Christmas is that my mom never got a chance to be a Gram to my boy. She never had the chance to come over to our house on bright Christmas mornings to share the day with us. She never saw the joy in my son's eyes as he opened his gifts or the joy in my wife and my eyes as he did so.

She passed away almost a decade before he was born and that's a real shame. She'd have been a good Grandma to him. I do like to think that she's here with us in spirit occasionally.

Especially at Christmastime.

So I sit here tonight and contemplate the Christmas's past and look forward to the one we'll celebrate in a couple of days. And I think about Charles Dicken's “A Christmas Carol”.

I've never been visited by a ghost on Christmas Eve, let alone by three of them, as was the esteemed Ebenezer Scrooge. But if I had been visited, I wonder what they would have shown me? Would the ghosts have shown me disappointment in my past, greed and stinginess in my present and, ultimately a miserable, desolate end? Or would my ghosts have been more compassionate and proffered up a more loving past, a dignified present and a long, admirable future filled with friends and family?

Who knows?

I only hope its more of the latter than of the former.

So perhaps its high time to buy the fat goose, to call the Cratchits over to the house for a Christmas feast. Time to put Tiny Tim on my knee and to be thankful for all the past Christmas's that have led me to this place rather than the place that was being prepared for Mr. Scrooge.

High time indeed!

So Merry Christmas to you all – my friends, my family and to all the friends I've yet to meet. A very merry Christmas to all!

And God bless us every one!