The Shape of Things to Come

My mother did not wrap little presents inside big boxes. She did not believe in deceiving people, especially at Christmas. She believed that Christmas morning was no time for disappointment. “If you’re giving somebody a shirt,” she would say, “it ought to come in a shirtbox.

“If you’re giving somebody socks,” she would say, “they ought to be able to pick up the package and squeeze it. People need to know when they’re getting sweatsocks. People need to know when they’re getting a package of underwear.” My mother did not believe in living a lie.

For that reason, my mother did not save boxes. For that reason, she only bought one bargain-size roll of wrapping paper every year. It always had Frosty the Snowmen on it. They were always smoking blackened corncob pipes, and they were always wearing red-and-white striped mufflers and jauntily off-kilter stovepipe hats. The Frosty the Snowmen always danced against a sapphire-blue sky scattered with misshapen snowflakes. Sometimes, they had plump little overstuffed Frosty the Snowman hands in which they carried holly wreaths and peppermint-striped candy canes. Sometimes, they toted little candlelit lanterns and sang from little dog-eared Christmas carol songbooks.

But always, under our Christmas tree, there were hundreds of them. Maybe there were thousands, tossed out in random repetition over acres of evening-blue wrapping-paper skyscape, then folded and creased around record albums and Monopoly games and watercolor sets and pairs of house shoes and hunting caps and three-packs of T-shirts and 12-packs of cotton handkerchiefs and six-packs of Fruit of the Loom boxer-style underwear. There was no mystery about any of my mother’s packages. Each package, even if it was a Schwinn bicycle with a kickstand and removable training wheels, was topped off with a red stick-on bow. There was no excess ribbon. There was no attempt to hide the Scotch tape.

My mother was not out to surprise anybody. She did not ask people what they wanted for Christmas. Instead, sometime in early October she would announce, “Christmas is coming. Start thinking about something you need.” It was all right, in her world view, if an 8-year-old boy thought he needed a theatrical make-up kit, just as it was all right if his 11-year-old brother thought that, for his own part, he needed a B.B. gun. She did not expect children to request T-shirts and boxer shorts for themselves, but she did expect them to have strong opinions.

Even when my brother and I were still believing in Santa, she knew how to cut straight to the chase. “Christmas is what Santa Claus does for a living,” she would say. “When he brings you a present, it’s just like when your daddy sells a car. Somebody’s going to be making payments for the rest of the year.”

When we sat on Santa’s lap in the department store in Montgomery, she would stand beside the arm of Santa’s make-believe throne chair. When we mumbled into Santa’s ear, she would say, “Speak up, Baby. Mama’s got to hear you. Otherwise, she’s gonna have to spend a lot of money calling Santa up, long distance, on the telephone.”

When she heard us muttering to Santa about Mickey Mouse Club ear-hats or Roy Rogers sets of guns and holsters, she would say, “Baby, you’re supposed to tell him about the puppet theater and the wind-up monkey that plays the drum.” My mother did not appreciate last-minute changes in the program. She trusted that, given the proper encouragment and an occasional motherly prompting, even a 5-year-old could be perfectly content to stick with the plan.

And yet, even as the sky-blue presents piled up under the tree, my brother and I hoped and prayed for confusion. In our Santa days we envisioned the magic of Christmas mornings bright with unspoken but still fulfilled wishes. Post-Santa, we thrilled at the thought of our father fighting the toy store crowds at closing time, minutes before the doors were locked on Christmas Eve.

On Christmas Eve, however, my father was always in bed by 9:30. By that time, my mother was always sitting in her Barcalounger, humming “O Holy Night” and eating a piece of her own homemade fudge. Then, at 10 o’clock, she would say the cruellest thing a well-organized mother could ever say to her children, there on the night before Christmas. She would look down at me and my brother, as we sat hunched forward under the Christmas tree, staring at the tumble of Frosty-spattered bundles, and then she would say, “You boys had better get to bed now. Tomorrow will be here before you know it, and who knows what you’ll be finding there in all those packages underneath that tree?”

In bed that night, my brother and I would lie awake, frenzied to sleeplessness by those two words, “Who knows?” We prayed in the darkness that, somehow, a blue ping-pong-paddle-shaped package might actually contain a pony. We hoped against all reasonable hope that a shoebox might contain a pup tent, complete with sleeping bags, camp stove, and a matching pair of army-surplus canteens.