Re: Fond holiday memories
When my daughter was 2 years old, I was so broke at Christmas I couldn't afford gifts, even for her. So I took some of my clothes, cut them up, and made a purse, a pillow and a girly snake out of them. My mom and friends donated buttons, rickrack, lace and assorted other decorations for them and I added some paint. There was no wrapping paper for the gifts so I painted some cardboard boxes with snow men, trees, reindeer and so on.
Christmas morning came and I was sick with guilt that my baby girl was going to be short-changed.
She came out of her room all sleepy eyed and saw the tree, lights blazing, with the painted boxes underneath. Her beautiful eyes grew huge, lit up with excitement, and she ran to the boxes. I expected her to open them to get the gifts out but nooooo. She wasn't the least bit interested in those things but the boxes??? Oh my word! You would have thought they were the most desired toy in the whole world and she was the only child who got it. She drug those boxes, unopened, around the house for months; stacking them, unstacking them, shaking them and listening to the soft sounds from inside, arranging them around her and some toys while she played with them or set toys on them like a stage, she wanted her meals served on the largest of the boxes, and would line them up beside her bed at nite.
When the boxes finally began to wear out, the gifts inside were exposed. Gia kept each gift in its own box unless she was playing with them and the boxes continued to be arranged around her bed at nite. None of her other toys received this care and attention - they could lay on the floor for years for all she cared but these three toys had a place.
Years later, when Gia had grown up and moved out of the house, I cleaned her room. In the closet, buried under years of priceless junk, I found those three boxes. The paint was faded almost to nothing, the cardboard was flimsy with age. The gifts inside were long gone but those amazing boxes remained, tucked away safe and sound.
It occurred to me then that a little child, my beautiful little child, had taught me the true meaning of Christmas.
Not a Season goes by that I don't remember those painted boxes and the pure, simple joy they brought to a little girl.
"May you know that absence is full of tender presence and that nothing is ever lost or forgotten." John O'Donahue, "Eternal Echoes"
Death is not a changing of worlds as most imagine, as much as the walls of this world infinitely expanding.