When people talk about holiday celebrations, their most memorable stories are usually about making-do. Maybe because less-than stories are easier to tell, are not so threatening than stories about plenty.
Maybe we feel less guilty telling the making-do stories but Christmas memories are as different as the people who remember them and the most treasured are often those threaded with sharing, the capacity to give, and renewed hope.
There were six children in my family, a large working class family. My father had a small glass and paint sales business and our lives rattled up and down with the economy. Usually Christmas meant oodles of brightly colored paper wrapped gifts tied with curling ribbon mounded around our tree. Never mind that most of them were socks or underwear, we knew there was the one special one buried there with our name on the tag signed, “From Santa”.
But then there were less happy times, when our Christmas toys came from charity organizations. One year a group of used toys almost didn’t make it to our house, but were delivered to my aunt’s house Christmas Eve where my mom wrapped them and then carried them home for us the next morning. Another year there were boxes of nameless foods delivered to our house where logs of processed cheese were stashed among canned vegetables and a frozen turkey. And then there was the year we received one present each, but we did get that one.
These are sad, futile memories. Not because there we didn’t get many toys, but because my parents’ struggle left them emotionally empty. No tree, no gifts, no gentle snowfall could mask the defeat in their hearts, but they put one foot in front of the other. Despair pushed aside.
When I was five there were only two children in my family, me and my brother. Christmas was young and joyous. We stenciled our big picture windows with elaborate scenes using Glaswax, a kind of pinkish wax for windows, coached by our mom. Sometimes she’d use poster paints with the window as her canvas and Santa would sail across a starry sky with the little family nestled below.
Christmas was golden. Tiny Tears dolls, Barbie, Tonka trucks, coloring books with a new box of 64 count Crayola crayons, not an off brand, were under our sparkly tree for me.
Cookie bake days at my aunt’s farm usually ended with us throwing up all the raw dough we’d snitched. Mom and Aunt Dynie helped us make snowy Christmas trees out of cardboard thread spools from the local sock factory. She'd whip up Ivory Flakes soap into a frothy mix that dried hard on the cones. We dusted them with glitter and topped each with a tiny glass ball. We made net trees, and plastic dry cleaner bag wreaths, and decorated them with small colored glass balls and we'd give them to our aunts and uncles on special holiday visits.
Times and fortunes change with some years more plentiful than others, but most haunted by sadness. Disappointing not because they lacked for gifts, or because they didn’t look like the scenes in department stores or stories on television, but because they were spiritless.
This year department stores look a bit like those used toys from so long ago, a little plain and hollow-- without soul, even a cold commercial one.
Still, days will grow long and spring rains will bring growth and plenty. Goodness and compassion twinkle at the edges if we look for them. “Kindness matters,” it really does, and this season we celebrate our gifts, our chance to be, and our potential for genuine contribution to this world in ways that will give us all sustainable peace though shared purpose and unity.
Happiest of holiday seasons to you and yours.
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