DECEMBER 5, 2024 – How can it be December 5 already? I remember when December lasted forever. No, a thousand years ago the earth wasn’t rotating any more slowly than it does today, but in my perception of each diurnal turn, our planet was definitely spinning at a more leisurely rate.
As a kid I was laser focused on the Ghost of Christmas Presents. This is not to say I didn’t appreciate the lights, food (spritz cookies), music or decorations. Those accoutrements were as important to the overall Christmas vibe as gift wrap was for the gifts.
In the wrapping department, Dad could have achieved far more bang for his buck if he’d figured out a way to wrap the main gifts that one year our parents gave my sisters and me. The presents were Dad’s idea, I’m sure, but given how “special” and relatively expensive they were, the gifts came from both Dad and Mother. For maximum effect, Dad lined up the sizable gifts in exactly the way you’d expect from Dad. They were spaced perfectly apart and staggered like four brand new automobiles parked side-by-side in diagonal slots on Main Street. His choice of placement was to catch our attention the second we pealed around the corner from the base of the staircase after galloping down on Christmas morning.
On this particular Christmas morning, however, I tiptoed down the stairs unnoticed while visions of sugar-plums were still dancing in the heads of my sisters and parents. I had two goals in mind. One was to make sure that I wasn’t too old to be on Santa’s list. The second was to see the proportions of the (wrapped) loot he might have deposited next to the Christmas tree.
The winter sun was beginning to infiltrate our corner of the world, but given that the shades and drapes were drawn tight, the living room remained in darkness. As I peeked around the doorway, however, I could make out the stockings hanging from the mantle. They were stuffed, alright, proving that “Santa” was still giving my sisters and me the benefit of the doubt. First goal of my scouting mission: check.
Suddenly I heard noise above me. A light thump followed by quick footsteps. My sister Jenny was up, and soon she’d be waking up our parents and joining up with our older sisters on their eager march down the stairs. They’d all have unkind things to say about me, I knew, if they caught me downstairs ahead of them.
I glanced quickly at the gift stash under the tree—the presents that a week or two before had arrived in a large carton from New Jersey—a box bearing a “Geo. B. Holman Moving & Storage Co., Inc.” (our grandpa’s company) address label and a colorful sticker featuring an elf saying, “Don’t open till Christmas!” I did not have time to conduct a more careful survey, and the four large (and black, as it turned out) unwrapped gifts that Dad had parked in front of everything escaped my notice completely. Emulating St. Nick in Clement Clarke Moore’s famous poem, I then turned with a jerk and sprang up the staircase straight into my bedroom just seconds before the train rolled down the hallway—Dad as locomotive, Mother, the coal car, my two older sisters the box cars; Jenny, the caboose. Once the train had reached the bottom of the stairs, I followed.
Already my sisters were all agog over the unwrapped presents that Dad had placed in plain view. Good for them, I thought, but me? My heart sank. No bicycle, no fancy toys, no sports equipment. No, nothing that lit my fire. I was already thinking ahead to next year and hoping that maybe I’d do better then. But first, I’d have to figure out what to tell kids at school when everyone would be talking about the cool stuff they’d gotten for Christmas.
The presents, you see, were four brand new violin cases.
If only Dad had figured out a way to wrap them, he could have given me a little hope, anyway, for something nice and exciting—at least for a second or two, before my sisters unwrapped their violin cases. It was on that occasion that I learned the importance of gift wrap, if for no other reason than to keep a kid’s expectations alive a teeny-bit longer on Christmas morning.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
