The first gifts have arrived from the east; socks, mittens and toques for everyone in the family, knitted by Grandma Susie. I wear her cherished socks each day (I get cold feet, writing) and a toque – to keep the heat, and my thoughts, from escaping through the top of my head. When my fingers start to freeze, I’m tempted to slip on a pair of mittens – but it’s too hard to type that way. While I work, putting one word in front of another, I think of Grandma’s tireless hands, all the small stitches she put into a life, one at a time.
These gifts last forever – the priceless ones. The album my mother composed: photographs of my father, drenched in dead light. The year my daughter had five dollars to her name and went to the flea market to buy my gifts: a belt made for a Barbie doll’s waist and a pullover made for a Buddha. The Christmas my husband went all out and bought me the MacBook Air I couldn’t afford (which, when the bill came in, I secretly paid for, knowing he could afford it even less.) For me it has always been easier to give, to lighten my own load rather than bear the weight of other people’s caring.
Sometimes, though, giving can get to be too much. Having to buy a pop-up hot dog cooker for a sister-in-law you never see, because three wise men bearing gifts to a babe in a manger invented the custom of giving Christmas presents centuries ago, is a desperate thing. Consumption being sacred, we continue to search for “the perfect gift”, the one that says “I love you” with a price tag that shows how much. We celebrate the birth of a very wise man who said we should give all we have to the poor, by showering each other with ultrasonic jewellery cleaners and motorized tie racks.
“Forgive me, giver, if I destroy the gift. It is so nearly what I would have wished for, I could not help but perfect it,” wrote the American poet, Laura Riding. A noble sentiment, in theory, but most days I don’t consider destroying my MacBook Air in order to perfect it; I am still, in part, a material girl. Besides, as my mother would say, to trash my laptop would be looking a gift horse in the mouth.
Last night I read “The Gift of the Magi”, a tale about the rewards of unselfish love, to my granddaughter, hoping she would understand why Santa will be making a donation, in her name, to the orphans of Palestine this Christmas. In O. Henry’s story, a woman sells her long beautiful locks to get enough money to buy a Christmas gift for her husband: a platinum fob chain for his prized gold watch. Her husband, meanwhile, is downtown hawking his watch to buy the set of tortoise shell combs his wife had worshipped in a shop window – for her hair.
“These two unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house,” O. Henry writes. “But let it be said…. that of all who give and receive gifts, such as they, are wisest.”
My father, a wise man in his way, refused to go into debt over Christmas. Coloured lights were a waste of electricity, wrapping paper a waste of trees. “Christmas is about family,” he would say, much to my horror: I didn’t want togetherness, I wanted gifts. Things you could touch.
The one gift I have left that my father gave me – the one, that is, I can still touch – is the charm bracelet he bought on a trip to South Africa. I often hold it in my hands – the bracelet I never wore – and think of him standing in some shop, in a foreign land, trying to decide which souvenir would appeal to me most, the daughter he tried to know.
Grandma Susie died last summer. She was still young, her hands not ready to let slip the beautiful and comforting things they made. “That means we won’t be getting any more socks this year for Christmas!” my granddaughter cried, when I had to break the news.
But Grandma had finished this year’s Christmas knitting in the long dark evenings before spring, as if she understood the importance of continuing to give, long after it is expected of her. We’ll open Grandma Susie’s gifts first, as we have done every Christmas, but hers will be the hardest, this year, to bear.
