The Art of Christmas Giving

 

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.”