Gifts

This is a story that starts out very sadly, so if you're depressed by the holidays you might want to skip the first part.

As far back as I can remember I've dreaded the holidays. Being poor, having constant family troubles and belonging to a strict religion made that time of year always pretty unhappy. I just hunkered down and hoped to get through without being yelled at or punished because I didn't do something I was expected to do, like sit in church for hours without moving or making a sound while a priest spoke mass in Latin.

Gifts were uniformly disappointing, too. My mother usually gave me dolls or socks or underwear for Christmas. I understand now as an adult that she was doing the best she could, and trying to save money at the same time, but as a kid I'd been told good children got what they wanted for Christmas. I was a pretty good kid, but while my friends received new bikes and cool toys and lots of treats from Santa, I didn't. I thought Santa just didn't like me (I've never cared for dolls, either, so I handed them off to my little sister.)

The one thing I liked out of the whole miserable experience was my Christmas stocking. Mom usually put homemade treats in ours, but sometimes she added cheap little toys or a box of Cracker Jack. I loved Cracker Jack and would make one box last for a week.

Fast forward to 1979, when I was in military basic training during my first Christmas away from home. My mother had been very angry with me for joining the military without her permission, but she was kind enough to send a box of oranges to me to share with my squad, and a little stocking filled with her homemade fudge.

That was the last time someone made a Christmas stocking for me.

In the 44 years since then I've always put up stockings for my family and filled them with treats. I even made new stockings for everyone a few times. Each Christmas I would wait to see a stocking hung up for me, but no one ever did that. The stocking you see up there was one I made for myself and hung up one year, hoping someone would put something in it. On Christmas morning I looked and found it was empty. I really don't like being left out, or reminded every holiday that no one thought enough of me to bother, so I didn't hang it up the next year.

To be fair to my family I never asked them to make a stocking for me. Since I bought all the treats and hung up the stockings for Christmas they probably assumed I would make one for myself. But every year that empty space (and especially the year of the empty stocking) really hurt.

Fast forward to this year, with all the usual bad luck that came with the holidays. It's exhausting (the new computer) and heartbreaking (losing our citrus trees). I've also had food poisoning -- not a terrrible case, but just miserable enough to make me weak as well as upset. The birthday/Christmas package I sent to my favorite person via USPS Priority Mail inexplicably vanished, and after two weeks I knew it was probably lost for good or stolen. There were several things in the package I could not replace, either. Her roomates are leaving to visit their families so she'll be alone for Christmas, and it just killed me to think of her on the other side of the world with nothing on Christmas morning. It made me angry, too. It's fine for the universe to do all this crap to me, but not to someone I love.

I don't know why I asked an artist friend I've known for a few years if they would like to do a holiday gift exchange to help dispel our Christmas blues a bit. Maybe I'm a masochist. Anyway, we ended up agreeing on making a stocking for each other (I didn't say anything about my unhappy experiences in the past.) I really thought I'd gotten over the Christmas stocking thing and hoping for something no one was ever going to give me. Then the package arrived with this lovely handmade quilted stocking stuffed full of lovely goodies for my art quilting, and all I did was cry for most of the day. Then I prayed to the universe and promised to stop hating Christmas if it would just find my package and get it to my favorite person. Silly, I know.

The next day (yes, literally, the next day) my lost package showed up on the USPS tracking page in, of all places, San Francisco. 16 days after I shipped it the package reached her doorstep on the other side of the planet, and nothing was lost or stolen. As you can see here she was able to set up a little corner in her room with the gifts and the Christmas stocking I sent her, and the wee Christmas tree, which lights up and plays music, too. The universe came through for me.

I confess, I still hate the holidays, but not with the venomous loathing I had before this one. I've always spent them trying to do nice things for others because I didn't think anyone should hate Christmas as much as I have. As you know my holidays last year were pretty much horrible, and this year they've been a nonstop nightmare. Except for a few things, like this stocking, and that package appearing out of nowhere -- and the universe finally taking pity on me. So now I have to find ways to stop hating this time of year, because I never welsh on a promise.

I'll start now: Merry Christmas, my friends.