On Christmas Eve when I was in fifth grade, with the clock creeping toward midnight, my father told my mother that he was heading out to buy some gifts.
It hadn’t been a festive holiday season in our household. My father was out of work and we were living in a rundown rental house where more than once
the water and electricity were cut off because we
hadn’t paid the bills. My parents argued a lot about money.
Technically, I suppose, it wasn’t argument. My father vented and my mother listened. Whatever that’s called, the tension over money was a constant nervous hum in the house, like the hiss of a high-voltage wire.
The coming of Christmas made it worse.
At 8 p.m. on that Christmas Eve, Santa, meaning my parents, had no gifts ready. Earlier that day, after an argument, my dad had gone out for a while, and when he came home -- I deduced from eavesdropping -- he had scored some money from who knows where. With Santa’s deadline zooming in, he announced he was setting off for some last-minute shopping.
In my family, the eight kids always went to bed early on Christmas Eve because, unlike the unfortunate children forced to wait until morning to discover what Santa had brought, we got to stumble up in the magical dark just past the witching hour, sometimes with reindeer hooves still clopping on the roof.
So on this evening, as my father left, my mother told my siblings to get into their pajamas. Then she pulled me aside.
Once Dad got back, she explained, there wouldn’t be much time to wrap the gifts, sign Santa’s gift tags and get everything under the tree on schedule. As the oldest, could I help?
The shock. The thrill. Me?
By that age, I knew who Santa was and wasn’t, but being inducted into the conspiracy, sworn to secrecy, elevated me to full adulthood.
Awhile later, my father returned, laden with boxes and bundles. He disappeared to the family room downstairs while my mother and I wrapped gifts quietly and fast in the kitchen. When we were done, I carried a batch of Santa’s goods down to be placed around the tree.
What I saw standing in the doorway of the family room is still vivid in my mind:
My father was kneeling next to the tree, assembling a bicycle. One of my brothers had asked for a bike, an outrageously large request that none of us was sure could be met, and yet here it was, being put together by my dad, who for the first time in a long time looked to me to be at peace.
I look back on all this as the night I realized how much it meant to my parents to give Christmas gifts to their children, and also as the night I realized that gift-giving can induce anxiety and require work.
I’m sure I received gifts that year too, but I have no memory of what. What I remember is the bicycle, and my parents’ effort to make us happy, and the rare look of calm on my father’s face as he put that bike together.
In this season of gift-giving, we’re often transported back to childhood. A lot of what we believe about giving and receiving comes from our early days. I’ve always been glad that my siblings and I grew up without expecting a lot at Christmas. I can’t swear all the others feel this way, but I think they would agree that whatever we got was plenty.
In some ways, growing up that way hasn’t served me. I’ve never been comfortable with extravagant gift-giving, which has left me out of sync with the rituals of the season.
It’s not that I don’t like gifts. I do. I give them when I mean them, and I appreciate what I get. When I look around my home and see gifts from people I love -- a lamp, a scarf, a dish, a vase, a book, a pair of earrings -- I like feeling the human beings incarnate in those objects. But the things are just markers of those relationships, not measures.
There’s no foolproof approach to gift-giving in this beautiful but fraught season, but here are a few thoughts I find helpful:
Give without expectation or demand.
Receive with grace, whatever the gift is or isn’t.
Remember that bigger isn’t necessarily better, and that less may be best.
And don’t spend more money than you have, except every now and then when you know it matters, like when your kid really wants that bike.