My Most Memorable Christmas

 

My Most Memorable Christmas

By Tiffany Gee Lewis

 

When I was 9 our family had a Salvation Army Christmas. That year, Christmas Day came two days late and featured such memorable gifts as a jewelry box with a giant rip across the top and a coat for my brother that was pocked with cigarette burns, which had been strategically covered by my mother with dinosaur patches.

 

The holiday came late and lean because I had been in the hospital for scoliosis surgery and had to convalesce in the recovery unit on Christmas Day, a most traumatizing thing for a 9-year-old. With the expense of the surgery, my family was, understandably, cash strapped. But Santa Claus, as it turns out, still fills the stockings that hang above hospital beds, and in fact the hospital is a pretty fantastic place to be on Christmas. A kind artist visited and drew my portrait, and a charity group gave me a stuffed nylon bear.

 

All these details, however, are footnotes to the real story of that Christmas. The day before my surgery, I was at the hospital undergoing a series of blood tests and pre-surgery screenings. My mom went to get a bite to eat in the snack bar. There, a woman sitting next to her slid an index card across the shiny counter. It read: "My name is Maria. I am from Mexico and speak very little English. I am undergoing hip surgery and need a place to stay while I recover. Can you please help me?"

 

It was six days before Christmas. My parents had five children, ages 10 on down, and a whiny dog and a daughter about to undergo back surgery. Maria smelled of cigarette smoke. But my mom, a lover of all things people, didn't blink. Of course, we would take her in.

 

So, what I remember most about that belated Christmas at home, beyond the sparse presents and the long days spent trying to adjust to the plastic brace strapped around my torso, were the nights in the yellow room that I shared with Maria. It was true that she spoke little English, but she told me about her boyfriend, Jorge, and we lay in our twin beds recovering, me with a back brace and she with a leg brace, as we listened to Latin love songs on her tape player.

 

She fit right in, and we did not think it odd to have this stranger in our home. My parents, through a long succession of foreign-exchange students and friends who just needed extra love and family, have always extended our home beyond the six children born to them. For many years after that thrift-store Christmas, we received a certain phone call around the holidays. The voice on the other line spoke rapid, exuberant Spanish. My dad would speak back in a mixture of high school French and mission Italian, and there was a complete understanding of love and gratitude for the kindness shown long ago.

That brings me around to this Christmas. We all have things we love about Christmas, and things we'd rather do without. By far my least favorite part of Christmas is delivering goodies to others. This is a terrible confession, I know. Deliveries to friends and neighbors are important, which is why I find myself every year, standing in the kitchen with a dozen cookie plates splayed about. We pile all the tired, crabby kids and adults in the car and whine our way from house to house.

 

This year, on top of the regular deliveries, we are doing the 12 days of Christmas for our 90-year-old neighbor, Miss Betty. I am not doing this because I am a Mother Teresa in the making. In fact, I was guilted into it. We went to a Christmas party at her house a few weeks ago and she introduced me to her friend by saying, "Tiffany and her boys live next door, but I don't see them much." I felt terrible. The last time we visited her house my oldest son accidentally kicked the China cabinet and nearly sent Miss Betty into cardiac arrest. I didn’t think she wanted to see more of us.

 

But with guilt hanging like a gauntlet, we decided to visit her each day for 12 days, each time bearing a small Christmas gift. Miss Betty has a house full of irresistibly touchable and highly breakable Hallmark ornaments -- everything a child could want to play with and yet shouldn't. My boys tear through her house pressing every button imaginable, as I hover anxiously in near panic. Needless to say, I have not been rendering this service with a song in my heart.

 

But, on Sunday, as we went to deliver the gift for the eighth day of Christmas, Miss Betty quietly said, "This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. I wrote a letter to my friend and said simply, 'You wouldn't believe how lucky I am to have three grandsons who live next door.' "

 

In my relatively few years, this is a lesson I seem to learn repeatedly: Service is never convenient. It's almost against our very nature, especially in this ever-busy era, to squeeze time into our lives and love into our hearts for others. We want to say simply, like the innkeeper so many years ago, "I'm sorry, but there is no room for you here."

 

The other lesson I have learned is that doing unto others is worth it, every time. This is particularly true during the holiday season, when it is hardest, perhaps most stressful, but never more needed and never more poignant. Even if we sometimes do it begrudgingly, when we open our doors to strangers from foreign lands, or free up our time for lovely, aging neighbors, or even deliver a plate of cookies to friends, we do it in the name of him who was born in a darkened corner and yet managed to spread light unto all the world.