Tag Archives: Christmas

Hilltown Postcards

A Yellow Toothbrush and a Box of Food for Christmas

Ah, Christmas: one holiday, so many emotions and circumstances. Happy Christmas. Sad Christmas. Rich Christmas. Poor Christmas. Stressful. Carefree. Lonely. Crowded. Weird Christmas.

I liked the ones we spend with our large family. Great food and laughs, gifts, and even one year, fireworks one daughter bought from the South where she lived.

We had a freshly cut tree with ornaments, many of them made by the kids. Why was one son’s Santa wearing gray and yellow? Because the red felt was already taken. Why did another son’s wooden Santa have a black, bandit’s mask? Just because.

We didn’t have a lot of money then, but we tried to buy thoughtful gifts we thought each child would enjoy.

On the Sunday before Christmas, the owners of the Corners Grocery would host Santa. We adults knew he was really Dave who lived in town, but for our kids who still believed, he was the real thing. 

Santa would station himself in the post office annex to greet kids and find out what they wanted. I recall one daughter asked for a yellow toothbrush. Don’t ask me why but we made sure she got one.

Christmas day was a mad dash for the kids to open their gifts and then we drove to my hometown to spend the holiday with my parents and to visit our extended family. When we lived in Ringville, the very helpful Win Donovan would visit our house to keep the fire going in the woodstove, our only source of heat, so the water pipes wouldn’t freeze.

I remember the Christmas after Hank was hurt on a job site a few months before. He fell 18 feet onto his shoulder because someone didn’t nail a board in place on the floor. He couldn’t work. The people who hired him as a subcontractor wouldn’t pay him while he was hurt.

After all those years staying home with six kids, I found a one-year teaching job. We kept things going with a starting teacher’s pay.

It was close to the holiday when we came home to find a large cardboard box on the doorstep of the house we were renting. It contained food and an envelope with $70 in cash.

We were stunned.

We asked around but no one would admit to it. This kind deed has not been forgotten.

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Memory

The Last Doll

As I recall, it was a few weeks before Christmas when my mother asked me what I wanted as we rode a department store’s escalator. I was 12, many years past believing in Santa Claus. My childhood was slipping away and I felt unsure what would happen next.

My eyes searched the store from the escalator’s vantage point. I pointed toward a boxed doll positioned on a shelf high above the store’s counters. The doll was a couple of feet tall and wearing a blue ball gown of taffeta and satin. Her hair was blond.

“I’d like that doll,” I said.

My mother was doubtful. “Are you sure?” she asked.

I said yes, and then later wished I had asked for something else. But my busy mother was relieved to get that chore out of the way.

As we approached Christmas morning, I was miserable. I felt the same way when I unwrapped my gift and stared into the doll’s blue glass eyes. Her skin was made of a synthetic rubber to make it feel like it was real, sort of, if the doll were a corpse. Blonde and blue-eyed, she looked like no one in my dark-haired Portuguese family. My guess is she was supposed to be a teenager at the prom.

I had other dolls, and even a Barbie. I named this one Veronica. She sat on my bed and got played with a bit. She was not my favorite.

My parents held onto Veronica in their attic after I grew up and moved away. One time as an adult, I brought the doll back for my daughters, but they were not interested in her either. By then, one of my younger sisters had chopped off her hair unevenly and the blue gown was raggedy. Her limbs were bent in a bow as if they had atrophied. Her shoes, sparkly high heels I recall, and underpants were long gone. 

Eventually, I tossed her out.

I learned a lesson that year. Ask for what you really want. But perhaps at that time in my life, at age 12, what I wanted was finality.

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