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The Christmas that didn’t come from a store

My mother loved giving gifts, and her generous heart just expanded every December. The family budget, however, did not.

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COURTESY OF YVONNE ZIPP
Paulette Watkins celebrates the season with a downhill run on a sled that probably was a gift for one of her kids. Christmas was her most wonderful time of the year.

Like Jo March in “Little Women,” my mom firmly believed that Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without any presents.

She loved giving gifts, and her generous heart just expanded every December. The family budget, however, did not. So sometimes she had to get creative. One year, times were tight for the small construction firm my parents co-owned. Mom let my brother and me know in advance not to make any lengthy Christmas lists.

So imagine my surprise when that morning the tree was heaped with a pile of my favorite things: books. My mom had headed to the library. A kind librarian helped her pick out a trove of novels for her fairytale-loving daughter, from “Five Children and It” and “The Enchanted Castle” to “Kate Crackernuts.” The books may have gone back in January, but the stories stayed with me.

Now that she’s gone, what I remember is her joy in surprising her family, and our utter inability to surprise her. We had to hide her presents until the last minute and couldn’t put her name on anything, lest a casual glance at a box give us away. One year I got her a small statue she had admired six months before ... in Idaho. We lived thousands of miles away from Idaho. She knew the minute she picked up the present.

For me, the most memorable gifts weren’t necessarily the most expensive. There’s a knitted sock monkey hat that I treasure like an heirloom, because it’s nothing she ever would have bought for herself, but she knew I would love it.

And, while there were other Christmases where my mom was able to abundantly fulfill her cocoa wishes and candy cane dreams, I have a soft spot for the Christmas that didn’t come from a store. It meant, as Dr. Seuss once said, just that little bit more.

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Mark Sappenfield
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