Thick enough to choke a horse by the time it was finally retired in 1993, it had been in print for a century until the internet began to emerge and supplant it. It contained within its innumerable full-color pages practically all of the wants or needs of any American consumer — aside from perishables, that is — and bore enough heft to register on a common bathroom scale. It was my childhood’s Amazon.com, and you didn’t need an electronic device to access its content. When neither stored away nor browsed, its “literal” physical depth allowed it to function as an effective booster seat for a toddler at the dinner table. That being said, my generation should be the last to retain any memory of handling the massive, unwieldy paperbound object known as the general Sears catalog.
Each fall, my siblings and I would haul this beast out of our grandparents’ hall closet in anticipation of Christmas and thumb eagerly through its exhaustive, static, two-dimensional display of wares to assemble our wish lists. For obvious reasons, the pages of the toy section near the back-half received the most copious attention from the three of us. The latest and greatest Star Wars or G.I. Joe playthings, for my part, made the top of my lists nearly every year during the unforgettable decade that was the 80s until I moved on to other, more mature interests. As my childhood faded from view, so did the Sears catalog from the marketplace.
Kids live for Christmas, regardless of the tools they employ to detail their desires as scrupulously as a corporate accountant. My siblings and I were no exception. Even when Santa was ultimately revealed as merely a jolly illusion, I found renewed meaning in my parents’ offer to assist in the secret Christmas morning facade of a visit from St. Nick for my younger sister’s and brother’s benefit. On these occasions, I was permitted to stay up later, given my help assembling gifts dubiously procured from Santa’s sleigh before placing them carefully next to the tree for discovery the following morning.
As a professional adult with a disposable income, I exchanged preferences and found greater delight in giving over receiving. For a spell, I had a knack for pinning down just the right item for certain family members or friends, often nothing that was pointedly requested, making the pleasure of the surprise all the more meaningful. Such gifts are unmatched in my opinion, for they have less to say about the thing itself and more about the poignant satisfaction of being understood by another so well that words stating wishes are wholly unnecessary — I know who you are, and here’s an object to prove it.
My wife did not long have an opportunity to make the acquaintance of this version of myself, however. I don’t know when the change occurred for me, but change it did. She is much more familiar with a husband who requires a detailed list of wants for her and for others each year the season returns and who, conversely, as she observed plainly early into our marriage, “doesn’t like things.” While I wouldn’t put it that way, it is true I have been known to struggle to compose a wish list. This past Christmas, for instance, I admit for the first time in memory I lacked the wherewithal to submit even a vacant sheet of paper with my name alone at the top. There simply wasn’t anything I wanted. Not to worry, though. My wife completed my homework in my stead. She can’t bear exclusion and would make certain the tree would shelter packages for me another year.
I’m not sure it’s possible for any of us to imagine Christmas without gifts; they seem one and the same, each inseparably linked to the other. I know this to be so for our own children, as I’ve observed the last five years with them. In spite of having begun the first few years of their lives in difficult places, mention of the season almost immediately inspires composition of their wish lists, which are hardly modest, as I might have expected, and are just as lengthy and comprehensive as any given kid’s. A glance back toward relatively recent history, however, as I’ve discovered, reveals portions of this tradition were grafted in, at least in America.
It bears no mention that gift giving is a longstanding, historical human practice across all cultures and timeframes. Its association with Christmas here in America, however, notably with children, has its own unique flavor. In a 2015 article in The Atlantic titled “Why Children Get Gifts on Christmas,” Paul Ringel attempts to answer the question, noting that “no broad historical precedent exists for the link” between the Christian faith and Christmas gifts, in spite of occasional references, as I grew up hearing, to the wise men’s offerings to Christ at his birth.
“The practice of buying Christmas gifts for children,” Ringel writes, “began during the first half of the 1800s, particularly in New York City, and was part of a broader transformation of Christmas from a time of public revelry into a home- and child-centered holiday.” Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” also known as “The Night Before Christmas,” was one of several tools utilized at this time by wealthy movers and shakers to migrate the season into the home and out of the streets. This poem was also among the first to promote the idea of Santa visiting the homes of children to distribute gifts under cover of wintery darkness and dream-filled slumber.
I acknowledge I could slothfully allow Ringel to expand my word-count and permit him instead to fill this space, though properly attributed. I’ll leave it to you, however, to determine whether or not to allow him the time to explain fully the finer points; his piece is easy enough to locate. Suffice it to say that Santa’s busy Christmas Eve distribution and the fact of kids as focal recipients of gifts here in the U.S.A. is a tradition that had a beginning not necessarily linked to the “reason for the season,” if you will. It is simply a tradition, nothing more, nothing less — a national, not religious one, it would seem, with curiously few, if any, authentic roots in the Christian faith.
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“I don’t want us to exchange gifts this year.”
My mother voiced it as a request rather than a demand of my brother, sister, and me a few months prior to our plan to meet at my sister’s in San Antonio for Christmas.
“I want us all just to get together and enjoy each other’s time.”
Mom had never heard of Paul Ringel and was likely unfamiliar with his article in The Atlantic. Nonetheless, it would be a first for us. In our adulthood, the gifting portion of my family’s Christmases had always been modest by comparison, but this year, we agreed the kids would have received a wealth of presents from exchanges previous to our gathering post-Christmas Day. So, we went giftless.
In the spirit of glancing backward at “where it all began,” a look back at our own personal family history might suggest this day was destined to arrive. As I’ve mentioned before, nearly 30 years ago, our family left the shores of America for the newly-rebirthed, post-Soviet era land of Ukraine to engage in faith-based humanitarian efforts with the people of Lugansk. As with a newborn, the country found itself in many ways helpless and in need of assistance simply to survive, having recently dissolved its ties with the former U.S.S.R.
Our time there was as much about scarcity as anything. While we wanted for nothing, we lived in many ways like the people, and we learned to live as well without complaint. We stood patiently in the same lines for bread and milk, walked or rode uncomfortably in crammed public trams, and lived as a family of five in spaces smaller than many ample single-person dwellings here in the States. You learn contentment, largely due to the fact that the others around you live in much the same manner.
The following year, we were provided a ticket home to furlough for a couple of months. I remember it well since our stay was marked by both the beginning and ending of the fateful and tragic Branch Davidian standoff in Waco. While the round-the-clock coverage kept us riveted to the TV, we found time to reconnect with family and friends, share our experiences, and enjoy a few lost pleasures on home soil. One afternoon in particular still stands out to us all.
Prior to leaving the States, we would occasionally make the drive on a Saturday from our home in Texas City to the Baybrook Mall to shop and stroll. It felt like a trip to Houston proper to a kid like me, though it remains today, as then, on the southeastern outskirts of the big city. Arriving for the better part of the day, mom and dad, without fail, somehow managed each and every visit to select, by chance, the one entrance of a chosen department store designated to warmly welcome us as a family with embarrassingly sultry displays of lingerie and underwear. Making safe passage past the undergarment gauntlet, we ventured into the mall for the day. Requisite apparel purchases aside, my favorite memories revolve around B. Dalton’s or Waldenbooks — neither of which exist any longer as shopping mall staples but nevertheless were all but assured that our parents would allow us to acquire from their modest shelves (by today’s standards) our latest literary interest, be it Garfield or Choose Your Own Adventure. Hours later, threads, books, and last-minute sweet treats in hand, we would pile into the van and head happily for home.
Fast forward to early spring, 1993, on furlough. Whether or not we entered through the same doors showcasing unmentionables, I couldn’t say. What we do recall is feeling unexpectedly and profoundly overwhelmed. Walking past one display window after another, we felt suddenly alienated, out of place, among the mass of fellow shoppers and surplus inventory. There were no lines in which to wait for essentials, no miles of walking in the cold, open air in hopes of purchasing fresh meat, bread, or milk. The meaning of “shopping” had been transformed for us. We felt neither better nor worse than those around us taking advantage of sale prices. We simply felt different, changed. Our values had imperceptibly shifted over the past year, and things no longer would mean what they once did.
Making a single revolution inside the mall, we spent no more than time, and this less than an hour. Pausing, we looked understandingly at one another, and left with nothing.
We would return to Ukraine not long after, feeling a little more at home there than the previous year, when we first arrived. Our stay would not last more than a couple months, however, due to a medical emergency, which is a story for another time. We all sensed, nonetheless, that something inside each of us had shifted due to the experience, many things, in fact, but notably our perception of needs and wants, what it was possible to live contentedly with or without. Re-immersing ourselves in the American way of life, we lost over time a little of the impression we felt that brief hour in the mall that day, but certainly not all of it. I have no doubt a residual shred of that impression prompted my mother to offer her request for our family’s Christmas gathering nearly 30 years later.
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We arrived in San Antonio dressed for summer in late December. The weather was uncharacteristically warm, but, then again, this is Texas. “If you don’t like the weather,” they say about a state bred for overexaggeration, “just wait a few minutes.” It should have felt odd carrying not a single wrapped package into my sister’s home, but, strangely, it didn’t. For a day-and-a-half, we ate together, played together, talked, shared, and reminisced. No gifts were opened or offered, and no one was the worse for it.
Like so many other siblings, adulthood has, regretfully, splintered my brother, sister, and I through physical distance and personal obligations for many years now. While I am by no means advocating for giftless family gatherings at Christmas, ours was exactly what we needed and wanted it to be, the “reason for the season” every bit as present with us as with other families of faith. We are rarely afforded the pleasure of each other’s company any longer and recognized that most precious and fleeting of gifts — time — is the best of anything we could offer one another. No need to spend money on an item destined to be forgotten on a dusty shelf or dark closet.
Prior to leaving, albeit reluctantly, my sister-in-law offered to capture a rare photo of the three of us together once more. The last time a camera caught us assembled was nearly two years previous, so we needed no persuading. Opening the photo forwarded to each of us, I glanced at it and realized — I had received this year many incredibly thoughtful gifts, all of which I appreciate. This simple, easy picture, however, I found myself valuing more than anything else I had received. It was, in essence, the final gift for an eventful year, our posture and posing signifying that at the end of it all, here we are, still standing, still smiling, and memorializing our connection, which is infinitely more important than circumstances or stuff.
While a picture may indeed be worth a thousand words, not all pictures are identical in worth. The heaviest of catalogs, filled merely with pictures of things, scarcely register on the scale against the ponderous value of a single photo reminding us who, not what, is most important. I hope that my own children will find reason to cherish a similar perspective 30 years from now, however technology allows them to preserve their moment. Only time, the most precious of commodities, will tell.
Time in a Bottle 