by Bill Crawford
The
thing I like most
about Christmas is the presents. To me, the pile of presents under the tree is
the modern equivalent of an ancient burial mound. The cache of brightly wrapped
Christmas goodies reveals more about my family’s desires, beliefs, and
day-to-day activities than any other depository of our material culture.
Presents-R-Us.
Okay. I may be overstating the case a bit. But I still like presents,
especially the inscrutably strange gift ideas my family seems to come up with
year after year.
Take my mother. For years, she competed with her sister to see who could give
the other’s kids the most perfect Christmas gifts. My mother came up with a
showstopper one year. She got a catalogue from a medical supply house and
ordered wildly exotic specimens for each of her nieces and nephews. Because the
date was late, she had the supply house send the specimens straight to my
aunt’s place. On Christmas morning, my cousins eagerly ripped open the packages
from their beloved auntie. Then, they screamed in absolute horror.
Instead of cute little spiders, the medical supply shop had sent thick plastic
bags containing enormous, limp arachnids, floating in milky formaldehyde. My
aunt threw the unique gift items out of the house as quickly as possible, but
not before the yuletide freak show had ruined Christmas morning for her whole
family.
Romance inspired my most creative Christmas gift-giving. When I was a young
college student, I set out hitchhiking from Boston to Wyoming to spend the
holidays with my wife-to-be. It only took me three days to arrive at the
quonset hut my beloved was renting in Buffalo, Wyoming. It looked like an
oversized 50-gallon drum dumped on its side and half buried. On the inside, it
resembled a 50-gallon drum with wood paneling. The only furnishings were a
stove, a table, two chairs, and a gas heater. There was a Leonard Cohen
elegance about the place, but for Christmas, I decided to turn the Quonset hut
into a mansion.
The transformation was easy. All it took was a magic marker and a few pieces
of poster paper. Over the door to the bathroom, I posted a sign that said, “To
the Huge, Enormous Natural Hot Springs Sauna.” Next to the back door, I posted
a sign saying, “To the Tennis Courts.” Next to the kitchen door, I posted a
sign reading, “Dinner Prepared by Claude, the French Chef at Your Command.” The
most convincing conceptual furniture I came up with was a picture of a TV which
I posted on a blank quonset hut wall. We actually wound up watching it quite a
bit.
For some reason, both of our mothers had a difficult time dealing with our
marriage. They expressed their ambivalent feelings in the Christmas gifts they
gave us right after the wedding. We opened my mother’s gift first. It was a
flexible plastic Gumby figure and a flexible plastic Pokey. “What does your mom
mean by this?” my wife said, a bit indignantly. We next reached for the present
from her mom. We opened it to find an identical Gumby and an identical Pokey.
Instead of asking any more questions, we bent the Gumbys and Pokeys into
incredibly obscene positions and put them on our mantlepiece.
My intense focus on Christmas presents has only increased since I have had
children. The way my wife and I deal with the intense juvenile greed that
Christmas spawns is to blast our kids with so many gifts, so much candy, and so
much action that they collapse from exhaustion before they collapse from
disappointment. The big drawback to this strategy is that it requires a huge
Christmas war chest. Unless you get lucky.
“I want some Barbies for Christmas,” my daughter asked one year at the height
of the yuletide season.
“You have so many Barbies,” my wife sighed. “Why don’t you just wrap up the
ones you have and put them under the tree?”
My daughter paused for a moment, looked at my wife, and said, “Okay.”
I couldn’t believe our luck. I quickly broke out the leftover Christmas
paper. My daughter began to transform the ignored Barbies into brightly colored
presents. My son got into the act. He brought in some fast-food plastic
giveaway items and began to wrap them up, too. Soon, there was a formidable
pile of presents under the tree.
“We need some more,” my son said.
“Yeah,” my wife said, sensing another opening. “How about you guys pick your
own presents and wrap them up?”
They jubilantly fell into her trap. She carted the kids off to the thrift
store. They bought shirts, pans, old dishracks, plates. “Buy big stuff, it’ll
wrap better,” she suggested, careful to steer them away from anything that cost
much more than a dollar.
My wife returned home with a carload of stuff. It took days to wrap it all up
and put it under the tree. The end result was awesome. The pile of 50cents
gifts was taller than my son. And by the time Christmas morning came, the
children had completely forgotten what they had wrapped.
“What are you going to do with all your presents?” I asked my daughter.
“I don’t know,” she said with an exhausted smile. “I can’t wait to see what I
get next year.” n Bill Crawford is the co-author of Cerealizing America and Stevie Ray
Vaughan: Caught in the Crossfire.
This article appears in December 15 • 1995 and December 15 • 1995 (Cover).