Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus and the Sears Wish List Catalog

There's nothing like Christmas. We come out of our winter dens, drawn like moths to gaze with awe at colored lights hanging from trees. Our hearts are a little more open than they are most of the time, and we wrap hope inside happy envelopes and boxes to give to the people we love. Children make their best attempts to behave themselves so Santa will bring them all they wish for, and our pets bounce around, happy that everyone is home on a work/school day. There might be snow, if we're lucky. 

I have a vague memory of celebrating Christmas in my Illinois childhood. If I part the fog that opens the gate to everything lost in my mind, I can see myself sitting on the living room floor unwrapping presents at Grandma and Grandpa Atherton's house. My parents are together, my aunts and my uncle and my 9-months-older cousin are there, and if I hot wire one synapse to another, I think I can remember Great Grandpa Mike sitting in his usual spot by the window. 

My Christmas memories post age 7 are set in Arkansas, at my other grandparents' home. These memories are forever visceral, even though the years blend together. I can smell the wonderful things Sha is cooking mixed with Bapa's cherry pipe tobacco smoke. I can feel the heat of the Warm Morning propane stove that keeps us cozy against the cold. My mom is home, my brother isn't in trouble, and the tension in the room when my dad calls is less electric, as if generosity is something all the adults drink like a cocktail come December. Michael and I are allowed to sit at the kitchen table and help Sha stuff pecans into dates and roll them in sugar. As many of these treats land in our mouths as in the big Country Crock butter container that acts as our Tupperware, but there's still enough left that I remember Sha separating the layers with Saran Wrap so they don't stick to each other. It takes a few minutes to suck all the gooey sweetness off our fingers when we're finished. We go out to play under the winter tree branches as often as we want or under direction when we start getting too wild in the house. I remember the privilege of getting to watch soap operas on television in the afternoons and catching up on story lines I followed during my last bout of tonsillitis. The characters celebrate Jesus and make me wonder how sex works. No one in my family talks about either of those things. 

There are 2 events that stand as the welcoming hallmarks of those Christmas days. The first is the day we put up our little table top Christmas tree and Sha pulls Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus out of their shoe box. Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus are precious relics from times past, perfectly preserved in tissue paper so nothing ruins their soft red felt clothing. They are about a foot tall in my memory and solid in my child hands. There are tufts of white fur as his beard, around their hats, his coat, her long skirt hem. They are dazzling and perfect and look back at my brother and me with kind eyes. Once they are in place atop the cotton batting that approximates snow, we are no longer allowed to touch them because their falling would upset the delicate balance of other things around the tree. They glow in patterns by the light of the stove at night, and I feel safer with them watching over me as I crawl into my sleeping bag under them. I watch them as long as I can every night until my eyelids can no longer bear the weight of consciousness. 

The second event is the annual arrival of the big Sears Christmas Wish List Catalog. Every year, this monstrously thick book arrives by mail, and we each take turns browsing over 600 pages of clothes and toys and sports equipment and musical instruments and Christmas decor and kitchen gadgets and tools to fill a Craftsman tower. Neither our tiny house nor my grandparents' Social Security checks support owning much of anything, but within the pages of the catalog, our imaginations run wild with all the things we dream of having. The ladies' wear section is first, but I skip right over those yucky clothes to the boys' clothing section. The boys get to wear long sleeved rugby shirts with different color stripes and Toughskins, the Sears brand of pre-ruin patch fortified jeans. They get to wear soft brown and navy corduroys and pajamas with logos of the NFL team of their choosing. There are even padded football uniforms and helmets so you can feel like you are playing real football like Terry Bradshaw or Roger Starbauch. They are the clothes of boys who have looks of bright futures in their eyes. The pictures show them playing on their green lawns or in their fireplace-warmed houses with both of their parents fawning over them with loving gazes. My imagination inserts me into those scenes, into those boy bodies and those intact middle-class families. If everything I could order from that catalog fell from the sky in a moment of Divine Intervention, I couldn't get as much pleasure as I get from living in my Sears Wish List fantasies every year. 

Our actual gifts are always modest and practical. My dad sends my brother and I a Barbie doll and a GI Joe or something like it. I keep my collection in a small suitcase that slides under the couch. Michael has a cardboard box somewhere to store his treasures. The rest of our presents are warm clothes, which we need to replace the ones we have outgrown from the previous winter. My mom usually gets a new robe, Bapa a can of his favorite pipe tobacco, Sha a new diary. 

Sha includes me in her ritual of closing out her old diary and writing on the fresh new pages at the change of the year. I am intoxicated by the process. During my 11th Christmas, she gifts me a ream of notebook paper and a package of pens. It is the best Christmas gift I will ever receive by anyone. Sha promises me that one day when she is gone, all her diaries will belong to me. In later years, she repeats her promise with an additional phrase, "...and then you will know what really happened." 

Shortly after the turn of each new year, the tree is de-tinseled and stored, Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus go back to their tissue-wrapped hibernation, and the newest Sears catalog replaces the previous year's position as support for the chair with the busted leg. Everyone's good mood of days past is gradually replaced with the irritation of dealing with each other for too long a stretch. Michael and I walk to the end of the driveway in the snow and cold, and wait for the school bus to cast us back into society. 

------------------------ 

I was standing in one of the gift shops at the Biltmore Estate last Sunday, looking at a shelf of carved Santas. One of them had a painted bird egg blue gown with white scrolls cascading to the floor under his red coat. Another had some kind of metal hoop contraption at his waist, from which a team of reindeer pulling a sled spun around him. Yet another had the Biltmore Estate carved into the bottom of his gown. They were beautiful, and I teared up as I thought about Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus. I hadn't seen them since I was 14 years old, during the last Christmas I lived with Bapa and Sha. I have no idea where they are now, whether the woman who took over the house after Sha died kept them with her family, or they were taken to the junk yard eventually. They are heirlooms lost to me. 

I stood in the gift shop and cried a little, missing all my lost things: Mr. and Mrs. Claus, the dreams inside the Sears Christmas Wish List Catalog, all my grandparents, my parents, my brother, my cousin...even my Aunt Vickie, who is still alive but a 12 hour drive away. I wanted to jump in my car and speed as fast as I could to her in that moment. But I knew that even this beloved touchstone could not fill the depth of ache in my heart. That ache is for people I won't see again in this life, for the most part. I can only hope that from where they are, they can see that I've made something good of my life, that they are proud of me, that they forgive me. 

I have my Sha's diaries, as she promised, but I have not yet read to a place where she will reveal what really happened in our family. For right now, it is 1970 in Sha's world. I have been born, and she and my Bapa are thrilled. They drive back and forth on the same Arkansas to Illinois highways that my father will travel in years to come, both for the reason of claiming me, their beloved descendant. Sometimes I hold these precious relics up to my nose, to breathe in the scent of the old paper, to conjure my sweet grandmother. Sometimes, I can almost feel her right here with me. Sometimes, I can almost feel them all.