A Simple Christmas (4 page)

Pat was not only more patient than I was but also quite skillful at unwrapping the gifts, carefully sliding the gift wrap from the boxes, and then very artfully rewrapping them so that all of the loot was back under the tree, just as it had been, before our parents got home. Pat was a theater and English major in college and later taught acting and theater at the high-school level for many years, but I don't think she gave me proper credit for helping to launch her career by giving her the opportunity to hone her acting chops by explaining to our parents how anxious we were to know what was in our Christmas packages and asking if they would please tell us or let us open something early. Her talent for feigning total ignorance of what we'd be getting for Christmas in the days running up to the big moment was brilliant, but Christmas morning was truly an Oscar-worthy performance as she shrieked with glee and acted flabbergasted as she opened her boxes and convinced everyone in the room that she was absolutely surprised to behold these fine gifts. Heck, she had me believing that she was surprised, and I knew darn well that she had already had that thing out of the box every day for the past two weeks!

I also did my best to convey surprise as I opened my gifts. Phrases like “Wow! I can't believe it!” freely burst from my mouth when the only thing that would have surprised me was if, somehow, I had gotten anything other than whatever toy I held in my hands. My parents beamed as they watched my sister and me scream with delight and awe and undoubtedly congratulated themselves for their brilliant gift selection and for doing such a fine job of creating just the right magic of Christmas suspense.

Sometimes, my parents got us gifts that were too large to be wrapped and placed under the tree, but that didn't pose any problem for us. We got pretty good at combing every possible hiding place that might exist in our house, and few items escaped our detective work. It's too bad that we weren't assigned the task of locating the body of Jimmy Hoffa when the longtime labor boss disappeared. I'm pretty sure we could have found him in short order.

We didn't keep a record of just how many years this whole Christmas-morning-surprise business continued, since we didn't want to leave any records of the crime. We were practicing plausible deniability long before we knew what that meant or how it could be used in a cover-up. It's fair to say that most of our early Christmas experiences were filled with joy on two fronts— joy that we got something, and greater joy for having enjoyed our gifts and not gotten caught, even though we had already worn some of them out long before their official unveiling.

It's a well-known fact that most criminals get sloppy once they become successful, and while I'm not sure that what we did was an actual crime, I have chosen not to reveal these stories until now, when I am sure the statute of limitations has long since passed on any punishment my parents could dole out. Until now, I was certain that, if they found out what my sister and I had been up to, they would cut us out of the will.

Even though we weren't criminals, our “crime” did become sloppier as time went on. Our ruse came to a crashing halt one particularly careless Christmas when I was about nine or ten during which I got sloppy in more ways than one. My requested gift that year was a new football. Like most of what we received at Christmas, it would be ordered from one of three Christmas catalogs that came to our house—Sears, Montgomery Ward, and J. C. Penney.

After school, football fairly well dominated the afternoons for the kids of our neighborhood during the fall football season. We'd gather on the vacant field behind my grandparents' house and play until it was so dark that the football hit us in the face because we couldn't see it anymore.

My parents bought me my requested gift that year—a brown leather J.C. Higgins football from Sears. It was a nice ball, and I was excited to use it. My friends and I always hoped that at least one of us got a new football each year, because it usually took us about that long to wear the old one out. This was the first year that I was getting the football, and given that it was my first really official, regulation-sized, leather football, I was pretty proud of it and could hardly be expected to wait until Christmas Day to play with it. Heck, the season would end pretty soon after that, and I couldn't think of any reason to miss out on a couple of prime weeks to enjoy such a great gift.

Each day, Pat and I would hurry home from school and she would go to work like a skillful surgeon removing the tape and paper, and we'd spend the afternoon playing with our new stuff until it was time to put everything back where we'd gotten it before our parents got home.

The year I got my football, I was so excited to use it that I guess one day our game ran a little late and I wasn't as careful as I should have been when I had to put the ball away. I just knew that when I opened my presents on Christmas Day and tore into the box with the football, all my now keenly developed acting skills would never mask the fact that my “brand new” football was covered in mud! I suggested that maybe it was a new marketing ploy by Sears to create a greater sense of reality by shipping the football with mud and dirt already on it. I admit that it was a pretty lame explanation, but I didn't have much to work with. With suspicions now aroused, further examination of our Christmas loot revealed a chemistry set with half the experiments already done and a doll with batteries not included that somehow had mysteriously been blessed with new batteries.

The jig was up. We almost had our gifts that year confiscated and sent to some kids in China. My parents had always told me, “Eat every bite of food on that plate! There are kids in China who would be glad to have it, so you aren't going to waste it,” and as disappointed as I was at the prospect of having my gifts sent halfway around the world, I figured it was only fair that some little Chinese boy get my football, since I'd been eating his food for years. I wasn't sure if he would even understand football, but I had learned my lesson! At any rate, my parents finally cooled off before they actually sent the toys to Shanghai. I actually think they thought it was kind of funny and even admired how incredibly resourceful Pat and I had turned out to be. I think they figured that with gall like that, we'd end up either running the country or in jail. Luckily, I've ended up closer to the former than the latter, and since I've since stopped unwrapping my Christmas gifts early, I hope it will stay that way.

I have to confess that, although I don't sneak open my presents anymore, I haven't really changed much. I still want to open stuff once it's under the tree. I figure there's stuff there I might enjoy now, and if a truck were to run me over before Christmas Day, I'd never even know what I got, never would have the pleasure of using it, and wouldn't have the opportunity to thank the person who got it for me. For years my wife has hidden presents so I couldn't shake the boxes or worse, open and reseal them. (She's heard the stories.) Of course, she hides things so well that every year, there are at least a couple of presents that she can't find again. Some Christmas items don't arrive until March or April when she accidently stumbles across long-lost and virtually forgotten Christmas packages. This only validates my still-strong view that we should give the gifts upon purchase to avoid such embarrassing moments as having hidden the presents so well that a team from CSI has to come in and help find them.

I admit that I'm a bit obsessive on the patience at Christmas issue, but most everyone wants Christmas to come sooner rather than later. I'll admit that maybe my eagerness for presents is a bit extreme, and I'll admit that some things are worth the wait (at least having to wait to get that brand-new toy or gadget makes it even more exciting when you actually
do
get it), but Christmas is not just about the gifts, the food, and the decorations. I think the excitement over Christmas comes from a longing in the human spirit to know if there really is a God and, if there is, to get together with him right away. For hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, the prophets were telling everyone to get ready because He was coming. They thought it would be soon, though it didn't seem to be happening on their timetable.

When it did happen, it really snuck up on just about everyone. God obviously didn't want the kind of manufactured joy and superficial “frou-frou” that would have inevitably surrounded a highly publicized entrance on the planet. He kept things simple. And He kept us waiting and never caved in to the impatience, even the petulance, of the prophets and priests who thought His coming would bring glory to them. After all, wouldn't it be worth the wait? If everlasting life isn't worth waiting for, then what is?! By the time Jesus really did show up in Bethlehem, some of the most religious people and the high religious leaders had things all planned for His arrival, and they were pretty much in the center of the whole show. That's one of the reasons they didn't recognize the event when it did happen. The elaborate and opulent entrance that they envisioned never took place. No palace, but instead a little cave full of farm animals. There weren't fine linens and silks like they had prepared, just some strips of worn cloth that were used to wrap up the little baby.

This to me sounds like the perfect Christmas. Idon't mean the dangerous labor that the young Mary had to go through or the fear she and Joseph must have felt knowing they were all alone in the desert with no one to help them deliver this child into the world. I mean the lack of pomp and wrapping. I never have liked all that wrapping, and I've spent my life wanting to take the wrapping off the things people give me. I just can't wait. I believe that gifts should be given in a spirit of goodwill, not a spirit of “You can't have it until the day you're
supposed
to have it.” Maybe it's a character flaw, but I like to think of it as part of my spiritual DNA. I really believe that the arrival of Jesus on earth is such a big deal that I can't wait to find out about it. I'm ready to unwrap Him and get Him moving around and doing big things. I can't see a reason to keep Him hidden from everybody. A lot of people need Him now. This is the true meaning of Christmas. The presents are just something extra, and couldn't it be argued that making people wait until Christmas to open their much-anticipated gifts takes the attention away from what Christmas is really all about? I think that's a pretty good argument, don't you?

I know I need to be more patient about some things in life—I really do. Maybe this year I'll make a concerted effort to not shake the boxes under the tree, and maybe if I ask for something, I'll actually let one of my kids buy it for me. (Though considering I'm pretty set in my ways, that's pretty unlikely.) But footballs and chemistry sets aside, I still don't believe that we need to wait for some “special day” to find the real meaning of Christmas.

Yes, I've come to terms with my “sins” of unwrapping gifts before Christmas as a child and scheming to open them early even as an adult. And I've also come to realize that anticipation helps you appreciate things more. I could eat a green tomato and be fine, but allowing it to ripen to a bright red will give it the full flavor God intended it to have. I have learned that a carefully aged steak will have a full-bodied flavor that far surpasses that of cheaper cuts of meat. And I also know that the lifetime I spend on this broken earth filled with all of its shortcomings and problems and pressures will help me appreciate Heaven that much more when I finally get there.

There are some things in life that are best when experienced in their proper season and at the appropriate moment. It was a hard lesson for me to accept when I was a kid who just couldn't wait to get my new football, but I get it now. So what if it took me fifty years to figure it out?

I've also learned that even though presents are great, the greatest gift of all is the one God gave us that very first Christmas. He gave us the gift of life and of His love. Luckily, that's not something we have to wait for anymore!

2.

Sacrifice

On February 9, 1964, I was one of seventy-three million Americans watching
The Ed Sullivan Show
when the Beatles made their first appearance in the United States. My family usually watched
Ed Sullivan
anyway, but that night was something special.

Like many kids who saw this quartet of long-haired Brits with electric guitars and drums, I realized their music was something very different, and I immediately knew that I wanted a guitar so I could become one of the Beatles. So what if I was only eight years old at the time and had never played a guitar in my life? I wasn't concerned with minor details like that, and playing a guitarrealloud and having girls scream for me seemed like a great goal in life. I was hooked.

The kids in my neighborhood were just as stricken as I was, and we started gathering Coke bottles that we found discarded on the side of the road and turning them in for their two-cent deposit value. Eventually we earned enough to buy the 45 rpm record of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” with “I Saw Her Standing There” on the B side of the record. It was the first record I ever bought. Before that, I only had little 78 rpm recordings of children's stories with songs, like “The Poky Little Puppy” and “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” Coke bottles (in the South, we call all soda Coke even if it's actually a different brand) were the great equalizer of economic disparity among kids where I came from. Some kids automatically got money from their parents as an allowance, which seemed pretty terrific, but the rest of us could take our little red wagons (everyone had one) and pull them around town and pick up enough empty bottles to get some easy money, even if it did require some serious scavenging around tall weeds and ditches.