My Grandfather’s Gift
By Eden Baylee
I was twelve the year my grandfather died. It was mid December 1977, and as a result, we didn’t celebrate Christmas that year. I recall feeling very conflicted about his passing.
I loved Christmas, not for any religious reasons, but for the happy times spent with family. I lived with my two younger siblings, my parents and my grandfather. Grandpa was retired and the patriarch of the family. His son—my father, was the sole income earner who owned a Chinese restaurant with my uncle in a suburb a few hours outside of the city. It wasn’t practical for him to come home each night, so instead he returned to the city on Tuesdays and left again on Thursday. Those two days with the family were spent mostly looking after household payments. He always gave an envelope of money to my mother before he left, making sure there was enough set aside for the coming week until he returned. It was the Chinese way—we always dealt in cash.
As a child, I understood not to ask for things I knew we could not afford. Perhaps being the eldest made me feel I had to forego my own wants for those of my brother and sister. Christmas was the only time I gave myself permission to ask for anything special. It was never an expensive item, just something that would’ve been considered frivolous—a doll, Lite-Brite, or Spirograph.
We were brought up to be practical. If it couldn’t be worn, eaten, or read, then it held no value in my parents’ eyes. The year my grandfather died I had hoped to get my own stereo. I had seen a few models in the Sears catalogue, earmarked several pages, and circled the one I wanted on page 128. It was not the cheapest, but it was far from being the most expensive. I had already put the bug in my mom’s ear by the time school started. I was willing to forgo my birthday gift because I knew it was more than what my parents were willing to spend on Christmas.
Farmland
By Richard Thomas
John Redman stood in his living room, the soft glow of the embers in the fireplace casting his shadow against the wall, and wondered how much he could get if he returned all of the gifts that were under the Christmas tree—everything—including what was in the stockings. The wind picked up outside the old farmhouse, rattling a loose piece of wood trim, the windows shaking—a cool drift of air settling on his skin. Couple hundred bucks maybe—four hundred tops. But it might be enough. That paired with their savings, everything that his wife, Laura, and he had in the bank—the paltry sum of maybe six hundred dollars. It had to be done. Every ache in his bones, every day that passed—a little more panic settled down onto shoulders, the weight soon becoming unbearable. Upstairs the kids were asleep, Jed and Missy quiet in their beds, home from school for their winter break, filling up the house with their warm laughter and vigilante footsteps. Everything that went back, the long drive to the city, miles and miles of desolate farmland his only escort, it pained him to consider it at all. Video games and dolls, new jeans and sweaters, and a singular diamond on a locket hung from a long strand of silver. All of it was going back.
It has started a couple weeks ago with, of all things, a large orange and black wooly bear caterpillar. He stood on the back porch sneaking a cigarette, his wife and kids in town, grocery shopping and running errands all day. The fuzzy beast crawled across the porch rail and stopped right next to John—making sure it was seen. John looked at the caterpillar and noticed that it was almost completely black, with just a tiny band of orange. Something in that information rang a bell, shot up a red flag in the back of his crowded mind. He usually didn’t pay attention to these kinds of things—give them any weight. Sure, he picked up his Farmer’s Almanac every year, partly out of habit, and partly because it all made him laugh. Owning the farm as they did now, seven years or so, taking over for his mother when she passed away, the children still infants, unable to complain, John had gotten a lot of advice. Every time he stepped into Clancy’s Dry Goods in town, picking up his contraband cigarettes, or a six-pack of Snickers bars that he hid in the glove box of his faded red pickup truck, the advice spilled out of his elder’s mouths like the dribble that used to run down his children’s chins. Clancy himself told John to make sure he picked up the almanac, to get his woodpile in order, to put up plastic over the windows, in preparation for winter. For some reason, John listened to the barrel-chested man, his moustache and goatee giving him an air of sophistication that was offset by Clancy’s fondness for flannel. John nodded his head when the Caterpillar and John Deere hats jawed on and on by the coffeepot, stomping their boots to shake off the cold, rubbing their hands over three-day old stubble. John nodded his head and went out the door, usually snickering to himself.
Home For Dinner
By Kellyann Zuzulo
BEFORE
Not one day had passed that I didn’t think about him. It was odd, really, considering that I’d last seen him in grade school, nearly thirty years before. It didn’t strike me until later that it was odd, too, that I recognized him. But I did. Kevin Spinelli, my childhood crush. He stood across the street from me, a patient set to lips as he gazed up at the stoplight, as though he had all the time in the world.
His hair was still as black, still swooping over his left eye in a stubborn cowlick descent that was both mischievous and endearing. He was obviously taller, my height now. No longer was he the slight 11-year-old, with his adolescent slender neck poking from the plastic-lined shoulders of his football uniform like a twig on a sand dune. I was taller than all the boys back then. Kevin was the only one who didn’t call me beanpole.
Is that why I loved him with my fraught, juvenile perception of romantic love? Is that why I imagined, in another time and another place, he would be Ivanhoe to my Rowena—loyal and ardent? I guess I should really blame Miss MacCorkell, my seventh-grade English teacher, for making us read Sir Walter Scott’s ridiculously dated novel.
Yet, the story stuck with me, bolstered me when I detached from the increasingly cruel hierarchies of school cliques. Even in my tender pubescent state, I saw that Kevin Spinelli possessed integrity, as well as a twinkle in his cobalt blue eyes. When he told me a new knock-knock joke every Monday, no matter how corny, I always giggled.
There he was, standing across narrow Sansom Street, hands thrust in the pockets of a dove gray barn jacket. We stood 29 years and 5 yards apart. In the settling shadows of dusk, he appeared transparent, a figment of the past. In a sense, he was. My heart clutched. For an instant, I was 11, gangly and tingly all over again.
A Whiter Shade of Christmas
By Taylor Grant
Matt Connor had already lied to fourteen people since he’d arrived at the office and it was only 11:00am. He didn’t like lying, partly because he’d never been any good at it. But he’d told this particular lie so many times over the past five holiday seasons that he’d almost convinced himself of its veracity. Besides, there wasn’t much risk of being caught. No one had any real reason to suspect him. After all, why would anyone continually lie about something as innocuous as Christmas plans?
Matt glanced around at the honeycomb of cubicles that spread across the entire 5th floor. There were only a few stragglers left, all of them pretending to work. It was ridiculous to expect anything else. It was common knowledge that no one worked on Christmas Eve unless they had already used up their vacation time earlier in the year–or like Matt–weren’t in any particular hurry to get home.
Bill Girard, a lanky man with salt and pepper hair, stopped by Matt’s cubicle en route to the kitchen. He had a particular way of holding his empty coffee cup: dangling by its handle from his index finger. He swung it in seesaw fashion continuously as he spoke.
“So…what’s your excuse?”
“Hmm?” Matt didn’t look up, pretending to concentrate on his work.
“You must have a million vacation days saved up by now. Why are you here?”
“Just trying to tie up loose ends before the long weekend,” Matt said. It was his fifteenth lie for the day. At this rate, he might as well notch up another couple to break his record.
“Your family is local, right?”
Matt nodded.
Bill offered a bitter grimace. “Mine too…unfortunately.”
“That bad?”
“Are you kidding? They should have their own reality show.”
Matt laughed. Maybe for the first time that week.
“All right, amigo, “Bill said. “I’ll leave you to it. But don’t stay too late. The boss said we could split at noon today.”
Matt raised an eyebrow. “He actually said that?”
“Either that or ‘Stop stealing the office supplies’, I can’t remember which.”
Matt smirked. “Get outta here. And have a nice Christmas.”
“You too.”
And then Bill was gone.
Matt sighed and tried very hard to focus on his monthly marketing report. But all he could think about was how much he dreaded what faced him tomorrow morning.
Christmas Lights
By William Kenower
Christmas always began long before the actual day. There was the shopping, and the decorations in the stores, and the Christmas specials, and the Christmas carols playing in every restaurant, and most of all, if you were a child, your own imagination. My hungry imagination was always in search of that which would bring me happiness, and here was coming a day that seemed designed for happiness. No one I knew was allowed to work and certainly not go to school, and we gave each other presents, and you sang songs about peace and love and heaven and God even if you didn’t go to church. I wished often that all of life were designed for happiness in this way, but I understood also that this would have been like having just cake for dinner every night.
Still, the idea of this day designed for happiness would fill me and fill me and fill me with its music and lights and its presents accumulating under the tree, and now stockings hung over the fireplace until finally Christmas Eve would come and sleep was impossible. To sleep would in some ways make this like any other night, and any other night is not the night before the day designed for happiness. No other day could keep me awake at night, and I was moved by the stillness of the world outside my window. Everyone was at peace. I looked up at the night sky, and if I had been very young I would have been looking for Santa, but I was over all that so I found myself thinking of that song about the three wise men. I wished for something tangible to explain to me why this day kept me up at night. The presents, I told myself, turning from the window. Its presents. Presents are toys, and toys mean fun, and fun means happiness. That’s what this is about.
When Christmas Came Home, Again
By R. Jeffreys
I began disliking Christmas, the day my mother took my presents away. I could not really blame her. After all, I was the problem child—the chattering child—the little detective Colombo, who always had just one more question to ask. On that day, many years ago, I must have breached the limited boundary of what little patience my mother usually bore for me.
As I excitedly and apparently chattered away, while tearing away at the decorative paper of the store-wrapped gifts, which I still believed Santa had brought me; my mother abruptly pushed her voluminous collection of gifts off her lap. Louis Vuitton scarves and gloves, sleek, signature bottles of Chanel perfume, and sundry bobbles of shiny stuff cascaded onto the Persian carpet.
She abruptly stood and announced to the room. “Thomas, I’ve already told you, three times, to stop your incessant chattering and just open your gifts from Santa, quietly. Now, you can go sit in your room for the rest of the day,” she frostily said, pointing towards the hallway, where the paintings all hung in perfect symmetry on the walls.
My mother marched over to where I was kneeling underneath the Christmas tree and began scooping up all my presents—some still unopened—and then haphazardly tossed them into a large closet, which was adjacent to the living room. Mother turned to me, with a look as cold as Christmas stocking coal, and said, “you can have these back, when I think you’re ready to appreciate what peace and quiet means.” Silently, I walked down the hall to my bedroom and closed the door gently behind me…
By Eden Baylee
I was twelve the year my grandfather died. It was mid December 1977, and as a result, we didn’t celebrate Christmas that year. I recall feeling very conflicted about his passing.
I loved Christmas, not for any religious reasons, but for the happy times spent with family. I lived with my two younger siblings, my parents and my grandfather. Grandpa was retired and the patriarch of the family. His son—my father, was the sole income earner who owned a Chinese restaurant with my uncle in a suburb a few hours outside of the city. It wasn’t practical for him to come home each night, so instead he returned to the city on Tuesdays and left again on Thursday. Those two days with the family were spent mostly looking after household payments. He always gave an envelope of money to my mother before he left, making sure there was enough set aside for the coming week until he returned. It was the Chinese way—we always dealt in cash.
As a child, I understood not to ask for things I knew we could not afford. Perhaps being the eldest made me feel I had to forego my own wants for those of my brother and sister. Christmas was the only time I gave myself permission to ask for anything special. It was never an expensive item, just something that would’ve been considered frivolous—a doll, Lite-Brite, or Spirograph.
We were brought up to be practical. If it couldn’t be worn, eaten, or read, then it held no value in my parents’ eyes. The year my grandfather died I had hoped to get my own stereo. I had seen a few models in the Sears catalogue, earmarked several pages, and circled the one I wanted on page 128. It was not the cheapest, but it was far from being the most expensive. I had already put the bug in my mom’s ear by the time school started. I was willing to forgo my birthday gift because I knew it was more than what my parents were willing to spend on Christmas.
Farmland
By Richard Thomas
John Redman stood in his living room, the soft glow of the embers in the fireplace casting his shadow against the wall, and wondered how much he could get if he returned all of the gifts that were under the Christmas tree—everything—including what was in the stockings. The wind picked up outside the old farmhouse, rattling a loose piece of wood trim, the windows shaking—a cool drift of air settling on his skin. Couple hundred bucks maybe—four hundred tops. But it might be enough. That paired with their savings, everything that his wife, Laura, and he had in the bank—the paltry sum of maybe six hundred dollars. It had to be done. Every ache in his bones, every day that passed—a little more panic settled down onto shoulders, the weight soon becoming unbearable. Upstairs the kids were asleep, Jed and Missy quiet in their beds, home from school for their winter break, filling up the house with their warm laughter and vigilante footsteps. Everything that went back, the long drive to the city, miles and miles of desolate farmland his only escort, it pained him to consider it at all. Video games and dolls, new jeans and sweaters, and a singular diamond on a locket hung from a long strand of silver. All of it was going back.
It has started a couple weeks ago with, of all things, a large orange and black wooly bear caterpillar. He stood on the back porch sneaking a cigarette, his wife and kids in town, grocery shopping and running errands all day. The fuzzy beast crawled across the porch rail and stopped right next to John—making sure it was seen. John looked at the caterpillar and noticed that it was almost completely black, with just a tiny band of orange. Something in that information rang a bell, shot up a red flag in the back of his crowded mind. He usually didn’t pay attention to these kinds of things—give them any weight. Sure, he picked up his Farmer’s Almanac every year, partly out of habit, and partly because it all made him laugh. Owning the farm as they did now, seven years or so, taking over for his mother when she passed away, the children still infants, unable to complain, John had gotten a lot of advice. Every time he stepped into Clancy’s Dry Goods in town, picking up his contraband cigarettes, or a six-pack of Snickers bars that he hid in the glove box of his faded red pickup truck, the advice spilled out of his elder’s mouths like the dribble that used to run down his children’s chins. Clancy himself told John to make sure he picked up the almanac, to get his woodpile in order, to put up plastic over the windows, in preparation for winter. For some reason, John listened to the barrel-chested man, his moustache and goatee giving him an air of sophistication that was offset by Clancy’s fondness for flannel. John nodded his head when the Caterpillar and John Deere hats jawed on and on by the coffeepot, stomping their boots to shake off the cold, rubbing their hands over three-day old stubble. John nodded his head and went out the door, usually snickering to himself.
Home For Dinner
By Kellyann Zuzulo
BEFORE
Not one day had passed that I didn’t think about him. It was odd, really, considering that I’d last seen him in grade school, nearly thirty years before. It didn’t strike me until later that it was odd, too, that I recognized him. But I did. Kevin Spinelli, my childhood crush. He stood across the street from me, a patient set to lips as he gazed up at the stoplight, as though he had all the time in the world.
His hair was still as black, still swooping over his left eye in a stubborn cowlick descent that was both mischievous and endearing. He was obviously taller, my height now. No longer was he the slight 11-year-old, with his adolescent slender neck poking from the plastic-lined shoulders of his football uniform like a twig on a sand dune. I was taller than all the boys back then. Kevin was the only one who didn’t call me beanpole.
Is that why I loved him with my fraught, juvenile perception of romantic love? Is that why I imagined, in another time and another place, he would be Ivanhoe to my Rowena—loyal and ardent? I guess I should really blame Miss MacCorkell, my seventh-grade English teacher, for making us read Sir Walter Scott’s ridiculously dated novel.
Yet, the story stuck with me, bolstered me when I detached from the increasingly cruel hierarchies of school cliques. Even in my tender pubescent state, I saw that Kevin Spinelli possessed integrity, as well as a twinkle in his cobalt blue eyes. When he told me a new knock-knock joke every Monday, no matter how corny, I always giggled.
There he was, standing across narrow Sansom Street, hands thrust in the pockets of a dove gray barn jacket. We stood 29 years and 5 yards apart. In the settling shadows of dusk, he appeared transparent, a figment of the past. In a sense, he was. My heart clutched. For an instant, I was 11, gangly and tingly all over again.
A Whiter Shade of Christmas
By Taylor Grant
Matt Connor had already lied to fourteen people since he’d arrived at the office and it was only 11:00am. He didn’t like lying, partly because he’d never been any good at it. But he’d told this particular lie so many times over the past five holiday seasons that he’d almost convinced himself of its veracity. Besides, there wasn’t much risk of being caught. No one had any real reason to suspect him. After all, why would anyone continually lie about something as innocuous as Christmas plans?
Matt glanced around at the honeycomb of cubicles that spread across the entire 5th floor. There were only a few stragglers left, all of them pretending to work. It was ridiculous to expect anything else. It was common knowledge that no one worked on Christmas Eve unless they had already used up their vacation time earlier in the year–or like Matt–weren’t in any particular hurry to get home.
Bill Girard, a lanky man with salt and pepper hair, stopped by Matt’s cubicle en route to the kitchen. He had a particular way of holding his empty coffee cup: dangling by its handle from his index finger. He swung it in seesaw fashion continuously as he spoke.
“So…what’s your excuse?”
“Hmm?” Matt didn’t look up, pretending to concentrate on his work.
“You must have a million vacation days saved up by now. Why are you here?”
“Just trying to tie up loose ends before the long weekend,” Matt said. It was his fifteenth lie for the day. At this rate, he might as well notch up another couple to break his record.
“Your family is local, right?”
Matt nodded.
Bill offered a bitter grimace. “Mine too…unfortunately.”
“That bad?”
“Are you kidding? They should have their own reality show.”
Matt laughed. Maybe for the first time that week.
“All right, amigo, “Bill said. “I’ll leave you to it. But don’t stay too late. The boss said we could split at noon today.”
Matt raised an eyebrow. “He actually said that?”
“Either that or ‘Stop stealing the office supplies’, I can’t remember which.”
Matt smirked. “Get outta here. And have a nice Christmas.”
“You too.”
And then Bill was gone.
Matt sighed and tried very hard to focus on his monthly marketing report. But all he could think about was how much he dreaded what faced him tomorrow morning.
Christmas Lights
By William Kenower
Christmas always began long before the actual day. There was the shopping, and the decorations in the stores, and the Christmas specials, and the Christmas carols playing in every restaurant, and most of all, if you were a child, your own imagination. My hungry imagination was always in search of that which would bring me happiness, and here was coming a day that seemed designed for happiness. No one I knew was allowed to work and certainly not go to school, and we gave each other presents, and you sang songs about peace and love and heaven and God even if you didn’t go to church. I wished often that all of life were designed for happiness in this way, but I understood also that this would have been like having just cake for dinner every night.
Still, the idea of this day designed for happiness would fill me and fill me and fill me with its music and lights and its presents accumulating under the tree, and now stockings hung over the fireplace until finally Christmas Eve would come and sleep was impossible. To sleep would in some ways make this like any other night, and any other night is not the night before the day designed for happiness. No other day could keep me awake at night, and I was moved by the stillness of the world outside my window. Everyone was at peace. I looked up at the night sky, and if I had been very young I would have been looking for Santa, but I was over all that so I found myself thinking of that song about the three wise men. I wished for something tangible to explain to me why this day kept me up at night. The presents, I told myself, turning from the window. Its presents. Presents are toys, and toys mean fun, and fun means happiness. That’s what this is about.
When Christmas Came Home, Again
By R. Jeffreys
I began disliking Christmas, the day my mother took my presents away. I could not really blame her. After all, I was the problem child—the chattering child—the little detective Colombo, who always had just one more question to ask. On that day, many years ago, I must have breached the limited boundary of what little patience my mother usually bore for me.
As I excitedly and apparently chattered away, while tearing away at the decorative paper of the store-wrapped gifts, which I still believed Santa had brought me; my mother abruptly pushed her voluminous collection of gifts off her lap. Louis Vuitton scarves and gloves, sleek, signature bottles of Chanel perfume, and sundry bobbles of shiny stuff cascaded onto the Persian carpet.
She abruptly stood and announced to the room. “Thomas, I’ve already told you, three times, to stop your incessant chattering and just open your gifts from Santa, quietly. Now, you can go sit in your room for the rest of the day,” she frostily said, pointing towards the hallway, where the paintings all hung in perfect symmetry on the walls.
My mother marched over to where I was kneeling underneath the Christmas tree and began scooping up all my presents—some still unopened—and then haphazardly tossed them into a large closet, which was adjacent to the living room. Mother turned to me, with a look as cold as Christmas stocking coal, and said, “you can have these back, when I think you’re ready to appreciate what peace and quiet means.” Silently, I walked down the hall to my bedroom and closed the door gently behind me…