Treasury of Joy & Inspiration (15 page)

Night of Hope and Possibility

By Roxanne Willems Snopek

December 1999

F
lickering candles
glinted on crystal and silverware. Shadows dancing around the table mirrored the excitement in the faces of the children. Each had a carefully folded note tucked secretively next to her plate, awaiting the moment of revelation. For now, though, all was hushed expectation. It was a party, and not just any party. It was New Year's Eve. And for once, they were allowed to stay up.

“What are
we doing for New Year's Eve, Mom?” nine-year-old Stephanie had asked innocently during breakfast as I was wiping crumbs off the counter. “Nothing,” I replied grumpily, thinking of the various invitations my husband, Ray, and I had turned down due to the seasonal babysitter shortage. “We're just staying home.”

Stephanie's face fell, and instantly I heard the message I'd just sent. It was, after all, the Christmas season, when social obligations reached fever pitch and many a child kissed a babysitter good night instead of a parent. Parties were for adults, fancy affairs with fancy clothes and expensive food.

I recognized Stephanie's stoic acceptance of her peripheral status, and it stabbed me in the heart. Was this the message I meant to convey? That I stay home with my kids only when there is no better alternative?

I tossed the dishcloth into the sink and turned to my daughter. “Maybe we could have our own party.”

Stephanie's eyes lit up, and she ran to tell her two younger sisters.

We decided
on fondue, something the kids had always wanted to try. We whipped through our chores, ran out for the necessary ingredients and began our preparations, an air of festivity percolating among us. As the girls and I sliced bread and grated cheese, we talked about the past year and the important things that had happened.

“You know . . .” I paused for a moment, thinking. “I'd like to hear more about this when Dad's home, too. Why don't we each write down a few highlights of the past year or the milestones we've reached, and a couple of things we hope for or expect in the new year?”

The girls looked at me dubiously. This sounded like work. “Make sure you keep your list a secret until supper time. Don't tell anyone!” That did it. Each girl ran off with paper and pencil to start her list. Even four-year-old Megan wanted to make one.

That evening
we sat down to a simple meal on a shining table. The usual commotion of mealtime was miraculously suspended, and laughter mingled with the music whenever a chunk of bread was dropped in the fragrant cheese sauce.

“Well, who wants to read her list first?” I looked around the table. Ray and I had made lists, too. “What were some of the year's highlights?”

Stephanie began. “I started piano lessons. We had a great summer and went to the beach. A milestone was learning to cook All By Myself.”

Eight-year-old Andrea's list was sprinkled with exclamation marks. “I lost two teeth this year! Christ-mas was GREAT!!! I met a friend named Hannah at the beach!”

Megan hadn't written her own list, but she was determined to “read” it herself. “I can put my face in the water and blow bubbles,” she announced proudly, “and . . . Oh, yeah, I saw a mouse when we were hiking, before anyone else.” She sat down triumphantly while her sisters giggled.

Ray cleared his throat. “Celebrating our tenth anniversary was a big highlight for me.” He looked over at me and we exchanged a smile. I remembered a time when we wondered if our marriage would make it this far. Only Ray and I knew how much this anniversary signified. It was at the top of my list, too.

We went on to talk about our hopes and expectations for the upcoming year. The girls listed things they wanted to do, skills they hoped to learn or improve, and as they spoke, I saw how much they had changed over the past year. It wouldn't be long until these little girls would be the ones in demand for babysitting on New Year's Eve. How many more chances did we have to celebrate together like this? And how many opportunities had already whisked by, unnoticed?

Later, with
the children tucked in bed, Ray and I curled up in front of the fire. The lights twinkling on the Christmas tree added their soft glow to the room, and at that moment the air seemed charged with hope and possibility. This year when someone asks if we have plans for New Year's Eve, I'll tell them we're booked.

The Holiday I'll Never Forget

December 2011/January 2012

All I'm Asking For

by Rick Bragg

I
must have
been about nine years old, too dignified to sit on Santa's lap at the Mason's department store in Anniston, Alabama, but still young enough to ask—please, please, please—for a G.I. Joe. “You're too old to play with dolls,” my brother Sam hissed at me. Sam never was a child. My kin liked to say the day he was born, he dusted himself off in the delivery room and walked home.

“G.I. Joe ain't no doll,” I hissed back, my face red.

“Is,” Sam said.

“Ain't,” I said.

That, in Calhoun County, Alabama, in the winter of 1968, is what passed for intellectual discourse.

I was about to pinch him when my tired mother tugged me away to marvel at the fake snow around a deer with pipe cleaners for antlers. Sam marched up to Santa like a little man, presumably to ask for a chain saw and some shotgun shells.

“Do you think I'll get it?” I asked my mother. She was taking in laundry back then, and cleaning houses when she could. Christmas, to her, was a time of great fear, fear that it would be for her three sons a time of great disappointment.

“I don't know, hon,” she said, using her other hand to hold tight to my little brother, Mark, who had taken one look at the odd man in the red coat and tried to run for the high country.

“It's all I'm asking for,” I said, hopeful.

I didn't know then that just asking was like kicking her in the stomach.

It is hard, when I write of my childhood and Christmas, not to sound a little like Dickens. I am not saying I write that well, just that Christmas, for me as a boy, was always a kind of seesaw of gloom and glee, perhaps the plainest evidence of difference between the classes. A G.I. Joe was a dear thing, a real toy, more than my mother made in a day, some
days.

But when I think of those times now, the disappointments seem to lose shape in my mind, and I find instead things that seem, in my second 50 years, much like miracles.

The next day, I moped into my aunt Juanita's kitchen. Aunt Juanita, a tiny woman who could swing a hammer like a man, helped raise me. She fed me peanut butter cookies and fried chicken, though not in that order.

“What's Santy bringing you?” she asked.

“Well,” I said, “I wanted a G.I. Joe, but Sam said just girls play with dolls, and I ain't no girl so I reckon I don't want one.”

A few days later, I saw a box under her tree with my name on it. She had wrapped it in thin paper, thin enough to see through: G.I. Joe, the one in a sailor's uniform. I wouldn't have cared if he was dressed like an insurance salesman. I spent all the days leading up to Christmas with an odd peace of mind. When I unwrapped it, my mother pretended to be surprised.

Santy, she said, must have conspired with my aunt Juanita.

I love my aunt Juanita for doing that. I love my mother for doing all she could, day after day after day. I know the season means more than this stuff, that it might even be wrong to call such things miracles, even if just tiny ones. The miracle in it, I think, is in those two women's hearts.

The Gift of Possibility

by Esmeralda Santiago

T
hat Christmas
Eve, the streets of Boston were clogged with tourists and locals bundled in wool and flannel. Shoppers, hawkers and gawkers whirled and swirled around me. “Frosty the Snowman,” “Let It Snow!” and “Jingle Bells” played in stores; on the sidewalks, the street musicians did their best. Everyone, it seemed, was accompanied by someone else smiling or laughing. I was alone.

The eldest of a Puerto Rican family of 11 children growing up in New York's crowded tenements, I'd spent much of my life seeking solitude. Now, finally, at 27, a college student in the midst of a drawn-out breakup of a seven-year relationship, I contemplated what I'd so craved, but I wasn't quite sure I liked it. Every part of me wanted to be alone, but not at Christmas.

My family had returned to Puerto Rico, my friends had gone home during the holiday break, and my acquaintances were involved in their own lives. Dusk was falling, and the inevitable return to my empty apartment brought tears to my eyes. Blinking lights from windows and around doors beckoned, and I wished someone would emerge from one of those homes to ask me inside to a warm room with a Christmas tree decorated with tinsel, its velvet skirt sprinkled with shiny fake snow and wrapped presents.

I stopped at the local market, feeling even more depressed as people filled their baskets with goodies. Dates and dried figs, walnuts, pecans and hazelnuts in their shells reminded me of the gifts we received as children in Puerto Rico on Christmas Day, because the big gifts were given on the morning of the Feast of the Epiphany, on January 6. I missed my family: their rambunctious parties; the dancing; the mounds of rice with pigeon peas; the crusty, garlicky skin on the pork roast; the plantain and yucca pasteles wrapped in banana leaves. I wanted to cry for wanting to be alone and for having achieved it.

In front of the church down the street, a manger had been set up, with Mary, Joseph and the barn animals in expectation of midnight and the arrival of baby Jesus. I stood with my neighbors watching the scene, some of them crossing themselves, praying. As I walked home, I realized that the story of Joseph and Mary wandering from door to door seeking shelter was much like my own history. Leaving Puerto Rico was still a wound in my soul as I struggled with who I had become in 15 years in the United States. I'd mourned the losses, but for the first time, I recognized what I'd gained. I was independent, educated, healthy and adventurous. My life was still before me, full of possibility.

Sometimes the best gift is the one you give yourself. That Christmas, I gave myself credit for what I'd accomplished so far and permission to go forward, unafraid. It is the best gift I've ever received, the one that I most treasure.

Eight Candles, Nine Lives

by Melissa Fay Greene

W
e
parents
work so hard to relay the historical and spiritual import of religious holidays. No, we explain, Hanukkah is not primarily about gift giving; it's about a long-ago freedom struggle. The eight-day winter holiday celebrates the successful resistance of the Jews against King Antiochus IV Epiphanes of Syria and the restoration of the Second Temple 21 centuries ago. All our traditions—from lighting the menorah to frying the potato pancakes called latkes to spinning a top in the game of dreidel—contribute to the commemoration of these events.

Unfortunately, the Hanukkah observance that has stayed with my children as the most significant of their childhoods has nothing to do with religious freedom. One night in the 1990s, we tidied up wrapping paper and toys in the den while the lit menorah stood on the kitchen table. In our absence, as the many-colored candles snapped and dripped, our long-haired black-and-white cat, Ladybug, hopped onto the kitchen table and brushed past them.

“Do you smell something?” asked my husband, Donny.

“Is something burning?” asked Molly, our oldest, age ten.

It was Ladybug! The fur on her left flank had been singed down to the skin. She wasn't hurt, but she wore a peeved expression all evening, and for the rest of the week she hid whenever we began chanting the Hebrew blessings over the candles. Though her fur grew out as thick as ever, Ladybug took a dim view of Hanukkah after that, clearly preferring less flammable holidays, like Labor Day.

The following year, for a fifth-grade assignment about family traditions, Molly wrote about Ladybug's encounter with the Hanukkah candles. The teacher, Lynn Fink, a sporty and funny woman, enjoyed Molly's story and gave it an A.

Three years later, Seth got Ms. Fink for fifth grade. He also worked the scorching of cat fur into a writing assignment, and he, too, got an A.

Ditto our son Lee, three years later: same teacher, same story, same A. We had no idea these retellings were piling up.

The year Lily got Ms. Fink for fifth grade, she also felt inspired to pen an account of the night of a feline afire. By now, we were very fond of Ms. Fink. We invited her to join us for a night of Hanukkah. It was her first time to experience the Jewish holiday. Happily, she ate her latkes with sour cream and applesauce. Gamely, she spun the dreidel. Delightedly, she opened the small gift of homemade cookies the children had prepared for her. As the evening seemed to be winding down, she clapped her hands, rubbed them together as if before a banquet, and exclaimed, “So! When do we torch the cat?”

Sharing the Sweetness

by Tayari Jones

O
n the
25th of December, my mother expects her children to be present and accounted for, exchanging gifts and eating turkey. When she pulls on that holiday sweater, everybody better get festive. Of course, I would be the first Jones sibling to go rogue. As the middle, artist child, I was going to strike out and do my own thing, make some new traditions. From a biography of Flannery O'Connor, I drew inspiration—I would spend the holiday at an artist colony!

No one took the news very well. From the way my mother carried on, you would think that I was divorcing the family. Still, I held my ground and made plans for my winter adventure in New Hampshire. The MacDowell Colony was everything I could have wished for. About 25 to 30 artists were in attendance, and it was as, well, artsy as I had imagined. It felt like my life had become a quirky independent film.

By Christmas Eve, I had been at the colony more than a week. The novelty of snowy New England was wearing off, but I would never admit it. Everyone around me was having too much fun. Sledding and bourbon! Deep conversations by the fireplace! And that guy with the piercings. So cute! What was wrong with me? This was the holiday I'd always dreamed of. No plastic reindeer grazing on the front lawn. No football games on TV. Not a Christmas sweater anywhere in sight. People here didn't even say “Christmas,” they said “holiday.” Utter sophistication. Then why was I so sad?

Finally, I called home on the pay phone in the common room. My dad answered, but I could barely hear him for all the good-time noise in the background. He turned down the volume on the Stevie Wonder holiday album and told me that my mother was out shopping with my brothers. Now it was my turn to sulk. They were having a fine Christmas without me.

Despite a massive blizzard, a large package showed up near my door at the artist colony on Christmas morning.
Tayari Jones
was written in my mother's beautiful handwriting. I pounced on that parcel like I was five years old. Inside was a gorgeous red-velvet cake, my favorite, swaddled in about 50 yards of bubble wrap.
Merry Christmas,
read the simple card inside.
We love you very much.

As I sliced the cake, everyone gathered around—the young and the old, the cynical and the earnest. Mother had sent a genuine homemade gift, not trendy or ironic. It was a minor Christmas miracle that one cake managed to feed so many. We ate it from paper towels with our bare hands, satisfying a hunger we didn't know we had.

Some Assembly Required

by Floyd Skloot

M
y five-year-old
daughter knew exactly what she wanted for Christmas of 1977, and told me so. Yes, she still would like the pink-and-green plastic umbrella with a clear top she'd been talking about. Great to observe patterns of rain spatters. Books, long flannel nightgown, fuzzy slippers—fine. But really, there was only one thing that mattered: a Barbie Townhouse, with all the accessories.

This was a surprise. Rebecca was not a Barbie girl, preferred stuffed animals to dolls and wasn't drawn to play in a structured environment. Always a make-up-the-rules, design-your-own-world, do-it-my-way kid. Maybe, I thought, the point wasn't Barbie but house, a domicile she could claim for herself, since we'd already moved five times during her brief life.

Next day, I stopped at the mall. The huge Barbie Townhouse box was festooned with exclamations:
“3 Floors of High-Styled Fun! Elevator Can Stop on All Floors!” Some Assembly Required.

Uh-oh. My track record for assembling things was miserable. Brooklyn-born, I was raised in apartment buildings in a family that didn't build things. A few years earlier, I'd spent one week assembling a six-foot-tall jungle gym from a kit containing so many parts, I spent the first four hours sorting and weeping and the last two hours trying to figure out why there were so many leftover pieces. The day after I finished building it, as if to remind me of my limitations, a tornado touched down close enough to scatter the jungle gym across an acre of field.

I assembled the Barbie Townhouse on Christmas Eve. Making it level, keeping the columns from looking like they'd melted and been refrozen, and getting that elevator to work were almost more than I could manage. And building it in curse-free silence so my daughter would continue sleeping—if, in fact, she was sleeping—added a layer of challenge. By dawn I was done.

Shortly thereafter, my daughter walked into the living room, stuffed bear tucked under her arm, feigning shock and looking as tired as I did. Her surprise may have been sham, but her delight was utterly genuine and moves me to this day, 34 years later. Rebecca had spurred me to do something I didn't think I could do. It was for her, and—like so much of the privilege of being her father—it brought me further outside myself and let me overcome doubts about my capacities.