Jeremiah Tolbert

The hol­i­days are upon us, and with that comes mem­o­ries of my child­hood and fam­ily.  December is a nos­tal­gic month for me, but why is not a rea­son I can pin down.  Perhaps it’s because my birth­day is in December, so I have the dou­ble whammy of it being a tra­di­tion­ally family-​​centric time along with the sen­sa­tions of grow­ing older each year.

The other day, a mem­ory began to haunt me, and I think that if I recount it here on my blog, per­haps I can exor­cise it.  Is it nor­mal to feel guilt for some­thing so minor that hap­pened over 20 years ago?  I imag­ine peo­ple have felt guilt for weirder things.

Christmas day.  I’m 10 or 11, and I’m excited as any kid is.  I wake up at 5:30 AM know­ing that Santa has already been to the house.  He always comes right after sleep.  I wake up my lit­tle brother and sis­ter and we creep down­stairs to see what bounty he’s left.

This is maybe the first or sec­ond year since my par­ents divorced.  I’m iffy on the time­line.  But I remem­ber what hap­pened next like it hap­pened last week.

We get down­stairs, and under the tree is a sin­gle gift for each one of us.  First world prob­lem, I know.  Here’s where the guilt lies.  When our par­ents had been mar­ried, Christmas has been full of presents, toys, what­not.  We were spoiled—make no mistake.

For myself, a small globe of the world.  My brother had received a small stuffed ani­mal that vaguely resem­bled a par­rot.  I can’t remem­ber what my sis­ter received, but it was sim­i­larly modest. 

To say we were upset would be under­selling it.  I think part of it was, we had no con­cept at the time that our Dad bought these things him­self.  Part of it was that we were greedy lit­tle kids, but also, I think com­pared to pre­vi­ous years, we thought that some­how Santa was pun­ish­ing us.  We really didn’t think much of the gifts.  What had we done wrong that year? 

We crawled into our dad’s bed en masse, cry­ing and wail­ing. He woke to this, his three kids clutch­ing their gifts and sob­bing.  He didn’t get angry.  He didn’t get upset.  Instead, he did some­thing that I hope I will do some day with my own kids under a sim­i­lar situation.

Instead, he showed us what we had missed about our gifts.  My globe had topo­graph­i­cal fea­tures, bumps where there were moun­tains.  I had never seen that before, and it was pretty neat.  On my brother’s gift, he showed that it actu­ally recorded what you said and par­roted it back to you with but­tons on each wing—one to record, and one to play. 

The guilt lies here.  How must our ingrat­i­tude felt to my father?  I know now, and I even knew then, that times were tough, as tough as they ever got.  He filed for bank­ruptcy after his divorce, and he worked for the city as a meter man, writ­ing park­ing tick­ets.  We were liv­ing hand to mouth, with­out a doubt.  The only way he could afford Christmas presents at all was that he had a Christmas club account with his credit union that took a tiny frac­tion of each pay­check and socked it away.

My dad kept it together and did the best he could in the sit­u­a­tion.  I’m just in awe of that.  I’m sure our tears hurt him about as much as any­thing could, but he didn’t show it.    Eventually, we were pla­cated, and we went off to play with our gifts.  I won­der what he thought about as he lay there in bed? Did the sting go away quickly?  Was he ashamed? My guilt is that in our child­ish igno­rance, we made our father ashamed of the gifts he had bought us.

That globe became one of my prized pos­ses­sions all through my child­hood.  Long after it was some­thing I really needed, I used it as a piggy bank. open­ing it up and stash­ing my cash inside of it from work­ing in fast food.  I think I threw it away after I moved to Laramie, because it was lit­er­ally falling apart, peel­ing into pieces.  I really wish I hadn’t done that.  By then, the sen­ti­ment of the object had faded.  Well, but it hadn’t faded. It was merely dor­mant.  And right now, I wish I had it sit­ting atop my book­shelf.  I wish that I still had it, to show the mem­ory of my father that I am grate­ful for the things he gave me.

Instead, this blog post will have to do that.

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Tags: childhood, christmas, dad, gifts, santa claus, the globe