Line upon Line

In writing 100 gratitude prompts for our new “It is Well With My Soul” Gratitude Journal, I wanted to make sure that not every prompt was an invitation to just think harder about the present. Sometimes the present is too difficult to linger in, and you need a chance to escape to the best parts of the past, not to wish you were back there, but just to remember that your life has had beautiful moments and it will have again.

The Christmas season is a particularly tender time to do this, as familiar songs and smells and decorations fill your days with nostalgic reminders of other Christmas seasons. So, the prompt from the list I’m going to explore today is–

Share a Treasured Holiday Memory.  

This question, of course, brings years of different dear moments pouring in. It also makes me reflect on how much our perception of the kind of gifts we want to receive change as we grow older. My treasured memory is really three treasured memories that illustrate the evolution of what Christmas morning has looked like at different stages of life.

I remember one of my most memorable Christmas presents ever came when I was in 4^th grade. I carpooled home from elementary school with a family that had fire-bellied toads so our carpool made frequent detours to a store called Incredible Pets so they could pick up crickets to feed their toads. The pet store had a December display of bunnies, and I wanted one so much. They seemed so cute and impossibly soft and it was something I hoped for that I also assumed I would never get.

Imagine my surprise that Christmas morning when I looked on my little spot on the couch designated for Santa to leave things just for me, and there was a little black and white fur ball in a tidy little cage waiting to be mine. I was over the moon.

This year, what I want most for Christmas is for someone to deep clean my house. The things we hope for change so much as we grow up, but the gifts that mean the most are still the ones that show that our loved ones have an awareness and thoughtfulness towards our deepest desires—gifts of the heart.

One of the most legendary gifts of the heart from my family’s life came on a year that the house was full of teenagers. One of my brothers was starting to grow his hair out long and my mother begged for him to consider cutting it, with very little success. In the rush of final preparations on Christmas eve, my mother didn’t notice that my brother was in a baseball cap. Christmas morning came and we gathered in my parents’ room to find out together whether Santa had come (the youngest among us were still very young). Despite the early morning, Eliot was still in a baseball cap.

Once we got downstairs, one of the first to receive a gift was my mother. It was a clothing type box wrapped in paper with a note on the top with a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Rings and other jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift is a portion of thyself.” My mother pulled back the wrapping and opened the box to find that it was full of hair. She looked up and Eliot whipped off his baseball cap to reveal that he had cut the hair off that had been bothering her so much.

It was a sacrifice made out of real tenderness and consideration. It was a true gift of the heart.

It also made her cry and from that point on everyone would compete to be the one to give the gift that would bring tears from mom.

As we all grew older, and those that began to have their own families also had their own Christmas mornings, the day was no longer filled with enthusiastic children opening and playing with lots of toys. It was a few adults enjoying their time munching on stocking candy and chatting. And so, a new tradition was born; we were asked to bring a gift of ourselves to Christmas morning. It had to be something from the year that we had loved, whether it was a video or a book or a poem or a talk, we could bring something that had had an impact on us and share it with everyone else. It was a gift of the heart that would cost nothing, but mean everything as we tried to connect and enjoy one another.

I believe it was the very first year we did this that my oldest sister spent Christmas with us. She was someone that was, at times, very difficult to get close to. She was 16 years older than me and had had many periods of estrangement from our family and therefore had been absent for much of my childhood. I wanted to be her friend, but getting close always involved some walking on egg shells and that made it an intimidating endeavor.

Her gift of the heart that Christmas was a reading from a beautifully illustrated copy of O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi. For those who don’t know the story, it tells of a young, struggling couple who each want to give something special to the other for Christmas. The wife has long beautiful hair and only $1.87 with which to get her beloved a gift and so, decides to sell her hair to buy her husband a fine chain for his most treasured possession: his watch.

Her husband returns home to find her shorn and is somewhat dumbfounded. She is worried he doesn’t love her without her hair, and presents the valuable chain she bought. He clarifies that his reaction is not dislike, but shock, as he presents the intricate and expensive set of hair combs that he’d sold his watch to get for her.

They each sold their most valuable possession for the love of the other, even though it rendered each of their gifts obsolete.

(By the way, I highly recommend actually reading O. Henry’s version of this, LINKED HERE)

But as my sister read the book to us, showing us the pictures on each page, she began to weep. I knew she was crying because she was moved by their love for each other and hoped to be loved that way, and to have the opportunity to love someone that way.

It was one of those rare human moments of vulnerability that you don’t often witness from your closest friends, let alone from someone who has pushed you away again and again. She was still wearing her glasses since we were all still in “just woke up” wear and there were scattered hi-chew wrappers on the couch around her from our candy munching and somehow, she never looked more like herself.

Whether she intended to or not, she truly gave a gift of herself that Christmas morning, a glimpse into her deepest, unmet desires and by extension an invitation for us to love her a little better.

When she passed away unexpectedly a few years later, I asked if I could keep her copy of The Gift of the Magi. When it was finally handed off to me, I opened it and smashed flat in the back cover was one last hi-chew wrapper and it felt as though that morning had only just happened and no time had passed at all.

That Christmas ranks among my most treasured holiday memories because, rather than peeling back wrapping paper to reveal exciting, unexpected physical gifts, for just a moment, the defenses we all wrap tightly around ourselves were pulled back from someone I didn’t always understand and I got to see more than I’ve seen before.

So, now it’s your turn. This would be an excellent prompt to fill the first pages of your very own copy of our “It is Well With my Soul” Gratitude Journal to be preserved for posterity, or you can comment below—what are some of your most treasured holiday memories and why do they make you grateful?