what I got for Christmas

When I was little, and first beginning to write in a journal, I never let important days like birthdays or Christmas go by without carefully making a list of all the things I'd gotten.  When I look back at those pages, I wonder what else went on on those holidays, but what I have recorded is what color the My Little Pony was, and what my new skirt would go with.  It was what was most important to me on those days.   

Things are a little different now, but in the spirit of those days of journaling, I dutifully record here what I got for Christmas.

All of my husband's siblings came to have Christmas Eve dinner with us.  The turducken was a huge joke and a delicious success, the nativity scene with cousins was beautiful chaos, and it was good to have family near.  

Late that night, after the little children had gone to bed, I spied carefully wrapped packages with meticulous hand-lettered tags being slipped under the tree by their older siblings.  Two of those packages were for me.

One was from my daughter, a little book called "How to Design the perfect DRESS".

"Well, first of all you need a band with a bow around the waist. and you need ruffels, too.  Big, puffy slevves are good, and when it's puffy it's pretty.  The design can be anything like this: (stars, hearts, diamonds, flowers) and it's pretty when it's short, like this: (on the back)  THE END

You can bet I'll keep this one always.  

My 10-year-old gave me a carefully taped-together stack of paper cranes.  Seven cranes in all, in descending size, and in the favorite colors of each of our family members.  Except for the 1/2" crane that's the smallest, which he made in white because "we don't know the baby's favorite color yet."  I imagined his fingers working on the tiniest crane, thinking about each of us, hiding his work away until the awaited day, and I felt his gift become a part of myself, of our relationship, and of our store of beautiful Christmas memories.  

Grandma sent a box of handmade "fun cards" with suggestions for family activities that continues to give, and to remind us of her.  My son held one of her cards in his hand and looked closely at the ink drawings she'd made around the margins of the game instructions.  "She worked so hard on this," he said, awe in his voice.  Did she know she sent a life lesson along with the cards?

Last of all came the boxes of Kindles.  At first the children didn't realize what they had, and then when we showed them, the dawning realization in the eyes of our voracious readers was a gift all by itself.

Sometime during the beautiful, lazy Christmas vacation, all the children's bikes were tuned up and filled up by their father, and there were days and days spent riding up and down the road in front of the house in the winter sunshine.  We waved at them from the front yard, where we fiddled with the sprinkler system or sat in camp chairs in the shade.

And so these are some of the gifts I'll store away from the Christmas that's just passed, a list of what I want to remember from these days. Maybe things haven't changed so much after all.  

~MB~