Without thinking much about it, I had imagined my older sister
and I shared pretty much the same memories of growing up. It was a surprise
to find out that wasn’t exactly the case, and that the perspective of a few years
difference in age gave us two parallel but never quite touching views of Christmas.
“I remember our Christmases in Florida best,” she said as we talked on the phone
the other night. “Daddy always cut a tree down from out back
near Grandpa’s workshop. They were scrawny Florida pines, full of sap that
stuck all over our hands. I remember once after Christmas was over, Stu and
I dragged the tree back and tried to plant it in a hole we dug. I was sure it would
grow.”
She was talking about herself and our older brother Stuart, two years her senior,
six years older than me. I would have been only two or three at the time,
too young to be allowed to come along, or too young to
remember going.
“The whole family would decorate the tree with strings of popcorn and construction
paper garlands. We made snow for the tree with Tide soap powder mixed with
water. When it hardened it clung to the branches and turned white.”
We grew up south of Miami on a citrus grove that also contained two little houses.
The stone house in the back belonged to my grandmother, and we lived in the small
front house. It had started out as a garage and had been converted to a house
by tacking on three bedrooms. There was a wood stove for cooking and for heat
on the rare cool mornings in
winter. The Christmas tree stood against the far wall away from the stove
and across from the long dining table where all of our relatives gathered on Sundays
and holidays for dinner.
“You were too young to remember the Christmas Daddy built us a swing set in the
living room. Mom told us not to get out of bed or Santa wouldn’t come.
We started yelling that we had to go to the bathroom. Finally she came to
the door and said ‘Okay, but you have to keep your eyes closed.’ On the way
back we peeked through our fingers and saw the swing.”
I remember it sitting in the yard. It was big, made out of A-frames, and over the
years slowly turned a rusty orange color in the rain.
“We used to be allowed to pick our own toys from the Sears catalog. We had
exactly $20 to spend and we’d be excited for weeks looking at the toys and figuring
the exact prices with tax and shipping. I would change my mind a dozen times
before we made the final order.”
Here my sister’s views and mine are very similar. I haven’t seen a Sears catalog
in thirty years, but I can still remember how the toy section looked: colorful photos
of plastic service stations with little plastic men in white coveralls, gray plastic
castles with colorful banners, and knights with lances on horseback. The toy
section lay near the middle of the catalog, and after being thumbed through a hundred
times the catalog would fall open to our favorite pages on its own.
She said, “We were thrilled with the simplest toys. There were fewer commercials
on TV then. There wasn’t as much desire to have things that we saw advertised,
which we couldn’t have afforded anyway. I know now that we didn’t have much
money, but we didn’t know it then. When we were growing up, everyone around
us was poor, too.”
I never felt deprived growing up. It was only later, when I began to envy
the things others had that I didn’t, that I began to feel poor. But that was
more a spiritual poverty. As my income rose, the inflation of my expectations
made me feel as though I had less. It wasn’t like that when we were kids and
$20 could stretch for weeks at a time as we pored over the catalog. It was
like the parable of the loaves and fishes: We spent the little we had over and over
in imagination, and it didn’t run out.
