From Your Minister
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I still remember the Christmas I was in the 8th grade. There was a box under the tree, a large box, the kind that clothing came in.
I was quite excited about that box. Shaking it in the days leading up to Christmas affirmed that it was clothing—that particular swoosh that fabric makes moving from side to side in a big box, with the faint sound of tissue paper around it.
In 8th grade, I cared a lot about clothes. And I didn’t get a lot of them. Each of us four kids had $30 a month budgeted to cover all of our personal expenses—shoes, clothes, school supplies, toiletries. Mostly, to stretch that dollar, I made my own jumpers and A-line skirts—items which I wore proudly despite uneven hems, crooked zippers, seams where the plaids didn’t quite match. But I was excited to receive something store-bought, which didn’t come out of the monthly allotment.
Christmas morning, I chose that big box as my first gift to open. Underneath the wrapping paper was, as I hoped, a slate grey box from O’Neill’s, the nice downtown department store. I lifted the lid, parted the white tissue paper inside, and there lay… a Girl Scout Uniform. That white blouse and dark green A-line skirt. Matching green knee socks with gold tassles to go around them. A badge sash. A variety of pins, some little patches and the numbers of my troop, “6-7-1,” ready for me to sew them on. My face shifted from animated excitement to unbreathing stillness. And then, even though I knew my mother was eagerly watching my face, I couldn’t stop tears from beginning to pop out of my eyes.
“But…you asked for a Girl Scout uniform!” my mother said. “You need one! You just joined the Cadette troop!” It was true. I had just joined the troop, right at the age when most girls were quitting Girl Scouts. The troop leaders demanded that I have a uniform, so I had dutifully reported that to my mother. I joined the troop because they went hiking, camping, canoeing, biking— things my family never did. I hated the uniform and all of the pomp and circumstance that came along with Girl Scouts.
Now my tears started to fall in earnest. “I know I asked for it,” I sputtered. “Because I have to have one. But I never thought of it as . . . a PRESENT!” Now my mother’s face had fallen as flat as my own. “It cost $27,” she said very quietly, and she walked into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee.
All these years later, I can feel the swirl of emotions that competed for my attention as I watched my mother’s back as she stiffly walked away, as my siblings went on to open their own gifts, oblivious. Swirling grief. Deep disappointment. Guilt. Discomfort. The vying of my mother’s truth with my own to define what mattered in that moment. I sat in my long flannel nightgown and pink fuzzy slippers and felt awash in churned up feelings. And then, as my mother returned with hot coffee, I turned back to the tree and the other gifts and the morning, until the morning’s chaos jostled me back to the familiar. My mother and I never spoke of it again.
So much giving and receiving is like that. We try to listen to each other, to offer gifts that we hope someone else wants; we give sacrificially, and we don’t quite get it right. We try to receive gifts from others graciously and yet we can’t help but measure them up against what we had hoped they would be. If we could truly master gracious giving and receiving, we would be Jedi masters, I think. The force would be with us.
Happiness is wanting what you have, the bumper sticker says, and most dogs could teach us a lot about that. But as humans, it’s not as simple as we’d wish. My Great Uncle Louie, one of the most exuberantly happy people I knew, used to open the tie that my Great Aunt Annie gave him each birthday with genuine and loud appreciation. “It’s the best one yet!” he would declare, this working man who never wore ties. He would put it back in the drawer until his next birthday, when Aunt Annie would take it out, wrap it up again, and present it to his joyful reception once more.
I suspect he knew this procedure was a charade, that the real gift for him was the humor of the situation, and yet as kids we were awed that Louie could so appreciate something he already had. Annie swore he did not know, and Louie was absent-minded enough that this was entirely possible. But it was also clear that Louie was happy, loved his wife dearly, and felt that what he had was absolutely enough.
In this season of giving and receiving, may you know that you already have what you need. The tie you want is already in the drawer. No gift received can bestow upon you the truth of your place as a child of the stars, of the earth, can give or take away the spark of divinity that lives within you. Whatever winter holidays you celebrate—Christmas, Chanukah, Chalica, Solstice, Kwanzaa—may you begin those holy days, and, indeed, every morning, knowing that you have exactly what you need, and any gift you receive from someone else is frosting on the cake.
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