Up until I was thirteen, Christmas was an amazing time of
the year. My brothers and I helped my
mother clean house, bake cookies, and decorate.
Christmas carols played non-stop, and my mother sang along in her uneven
voice that always cracked on the high notes.
In the doorway to the kitchen, a red velvet bell was hung. The bell was
special, because in a time of hardship and poverty, one of the older children
had scraped up enough money to give it to my mother for Christmas. It was
tradition to pull the clapper as you walked under it, and it would play a music
box version of Silent Night. To me, it
was the embodiment of Christmas giving: a small, thoughtful sacrifice that her
son used to say to my mother, “I see you.
I love you. I think about how to
make you happy.”
Christmas broke for me the year I turned thirteen. It was 1983, and the recession was hitting my
family hard. Several members of my
family were either unemployed or underemployed, so it was decreed that we would
stop exchanging presents with the extended family and only exchange presents
within households. You might think that I was upset because I would be getting
fewer gifts that year, but that wasn’t my problem at all. My sadness came from the realization that
many members of the family resented having to go through the effort of giving
outside their households. Before that
time, I had thought of the family as one cohesive unit, albeit a scattered
unit. I thought of us as a puzzle that
came together to make a complete picture at special times of the year. It didn’t wound me to realize that people didn’t
have the resources to buy gifts for each other.
It wounded me to realize that gift giving in general was seen as an
exchange of money instead of an exchange of heart. I became aware that when my brothers and
sisters shopped for Christmas, they did not uphold the value that my mother
tried to instill in us all. They did not
look for ways to say, “I see you. I love you. I think about how to make you happy.”
When I was very small, there were times when I received
gifts that made no sense to me, and my mother would say, “It’s the thought that
counts.” I had faith in that idea: it
was the thought that counted. It was the
thought in my mother’s handmade gifts that made me love them. It was knowing that she took the time to see
me, to love me, and to try to make me happy that made me hold on to those gifts
for decades. The year I turned thirteen,
I was excited because I was finally old enough to take part in that tradition
and to look for ways to say to my family members, “I see you. I love you.
I think about how to make you happy.”
And that was the year that my brothers and sisters openly complained
about what a hassle it was to give gifts to one another.
As an adult, I try to carry on my mother’s tradition. I try to think about what I can give at
Christmas that has meaning and value beyond being the best buy for the best
money. I think about when I was ten, and
my older sister gave me a beautiful red dress with velvet trim and giant golden
roses. I loved that dress and wore it
for years, squeezing into it long after I had outgrown it. I still have it in a box. I used to take it out occasionally and think
about what a wonderful thing it was that my sister knew that was the perfect
dress for me. I was in my thirties when
I got the full story of the dress. As
she grew older and less careful with her tongue, my mother would sometimes reveal
the understory of my memories. When she
saw that I had kept the rose dress, she sighed and said, “I bought three dresses
for you that Christmas, but your sister was sad because she didn’t have
money to buy you a gift. I let her choose one to give you. I was a little upset that she chose the
prettiest one, but such is life.” I have
to admit it hurt when my mother told me that.
For years, I had held on to the dress because it was the nicest, most
thoughtful gift my sister had ever given me.
It took me a few years to piece together the real gift I had been given,
that my mother understood that I needed my sister to say, “I see you. I love
you. I think about ways to make you
happy,” and so that was what my mother gave me for Christmas.
Christmas is a hard time for me. Every year I try to think about what will
most tell my loved ones that I see them, I love them, and I think about ways to
make them happy. It is not about the most expensive gift or the most rare gift
or the greatest number of gifts. It is about
giving something that comes from the heart.
In my sons’ lives, it is their grandfather who is the master at giving
the boys the truest gifts. Ever since
they were born, he has made them a Christmas ornament that symbolizes that year
of their life. When the boys were
smaller, these ornaments were not very challenging for him. He got to spend a lot of time with them, and
their interests tended to be intense and easily expressed. He crafted a tiny red broom for the year my older
son carried a dollar store plastic broom everywhere he went. He made an intricate rabbit popping out of a
magician’s hat for the year my younger son wanted to be Greg Wiggle. As the years go by, the ornaments are less
connected to the boys’ lives. They don’t
spend as much time with their grandparents, and their dreams are more
complicated and difficult to embody in a simple ornament. Their grandfather has taken to making tiny
picture frames as ornaments with a nod to milestones like middle school
graduation instead of the highly personalized ornaments of the past. It doesn’t matter. Every year, my sons spread out their
ornaments on the floor before putting them on the tree, and together, the
collection clearly says, “I see you. I love you. I think about how to make you
happy.”
This is what truly should be at the heart of not just
Christmas giving, but all giving.
Whether you are giving to a stranger who asks you for a dollar to get a
meal or you are making something for the greatest love of your life, the
greatest gift is not just what you give, but how you give. If you give
expensive things out of obligation with a tinge of resentment, you are not
giving. You are simply following
form. To give meaningfully, you must
give thoughtfully. You must take the
time to say, “I see you. I love
you. I think about how to make you
happy.”
