My eldest, ever-practical daughter, who has made England her home, where she and her husband are raising their two boys, 6 and 7, wants to know what I want for Christmas. She is organized and dutiful. She will have all her gifts ordered and delivered to every family member in North America weeks before December 25. She could run a Fortune 500 company or perhaps a small country.

I’m in awe of this kind of efficiency. I’m also squeamish.

I don’t like thinking about what I want for gifts, looking up links, sending suggestions that will make the life of this person I love so much easier. I feel like I’m placing an order.

I try to flip this around. “What would YOU like?” I ask. “What are the boys into?” When I was visiting this summer, the boys were racing their bikes up a backyard ramp at breakneck speed in order to sail over their father’s prone body lying in the grass on the other side. Sort of an extreme trust-fall experiment. That made me squeamish, too.

“I’ve already bought your gift for them,” my daughter says. “I’ll send you a link so you know what you got them. Don’t worry. They’ll know it’s from you. I put your name on it.”

But it’s not from me.

I understand her thinking. She doesn’t want money spent on stuff the kids already have or that she doesn’t need. She returned the ring light I sent in what I thought was a burst of genius gift-giving during the pandemic within minutes of opening it. She simply had no use for it. She texted the news as I rode an escalator to the second floor of Macy’s. I cried in Sheets and Bedding.

“But what can I get them?” I protest. I want every gift to be personal, meaningful, and a surprise. She is, however, wearing me down. Plus, our roles are reversed now. I’m not in charge. Remember how you used to say, “You’re not the boss of me?” to friends and siblings bossing you around?

That ship sailed to England 15 years ago.

So, determined to be thoughtful, I start poking around on the internet for toys, and I find myself distracted from my mission by stuff for myself! A subscription to “The Atlantic!” To “Smithsonian!” A soft new robe! Woah—here’s a link—maybe I’ll just flag this one.

But the process is a little like Christmas when I was 14 and told my mother I wanted a record player and a hair dryer. About a week before Christmas, I found both waiting to be wrapped in the spare room. Exactly what I wanted.

I was so depressed. Might as well skip Christmas. Who cared?

Gift giving and receiving is pressure. I get that. It’s just that when you are inspired it’s the best feeling ever. Generosity is at our core. Some of the best gifts in my family history prove that.

Best gift surprise: shortly after my parents divorced and Mom and my sisters and I were still adjusting to the change, my older sister and I rushed downstairs Christmas morning to find we’d each been given a cat. My sister’s gift was a classy white Persian kitten. Mine was a giant striped alley cat who’d been around the block a few times—doing God knows what. Probably time in the joint. How Mom had found, purchased, and kept two cats a secret from us, I’ll never know. I’m sure she was compensating for our father’s absence.

Dad’s gone. How ‘bout a cat?

Best gift ever: My daughter-in-law entered my life shortly after I sold a book to Penguin Random House. That new-family-member Christmas, I still didn’t know her well. When I opened the gift she had made me (made me), I cried. It was a framed piece of original artwork. She had excised a phrase from my book’s dedication to my children, Audra, Andrew, and Emily, in calligraphy onto a background pattern so subtle that I initially didn’t recognize what it was. “My first and best stories,” it read. When I looked carefully at the background, I realized she had somehow laid the inscription over a collage of images of everyone I love. “My inspiration now and always.”

Did you know that different parts of your brain light up when you quietly feel into things that make you happy as opposed to things for which you are grateful? Try it. Stimulation of different parts of the brain initiates a subtly different feeling. Happy is a gift you asked for arriving just as requested! Yay!

Grateful is the surprise that blows you away.

Grateful feels better.

We had several Christmas traditions growing up, and one was the reading of “The Littlest Angel” around the fire on Christmas Eve. In the story, a 4-year-old cherub is having difficulty adjusting to heaven. He sings off-key, whistles irreverently, and constantly tumbles head over heels in the clouds. He swings on the Golden Gate, his halo is usually askew, he’s late to choir practice, and his white robe is grubby. Called before the Angel of the Peace to explain his mischief, the Littlest Angel confesses that he is homesick for trees to climb, brooks to fish, soft brown dust beneath his feet. He’s sorry he’s a disruption, but there’s just nothing for a 4-year-old boy to do in paradise. Yes, it’s beautiful, but so was Earth.

When asked what would make him happy, he asks for one thing: a small wooden box he’d kept under his bed, and lo and behold, the box appears. Suddenly, the Littlest Angel is the model of decorum. His behavior is impeccable.

Soon, heaven is abuzz with the news that a baby is about to be born, and the archangels are gathering their gifts. The Littlest Angel has nothing to offer until he remembers the box. It is all he has, all that he loves. He slips it among the magnificent, gilded presents of the other angels at the foot of the throne of God, then recognizes too late what a shabby and worthless offering he has placed amidst the glory. Mortified, he tries to retrieve it just as the hand of God moves over the mountain of gifts and chooses his to open.

Inside the box are two perfect white stones found playing on a muddy riverbank with his friends on a long-ago summer day, a butterfly with golden wings, and a sky-blue eggshell from a nest in the olive tree next to his mother’s kitchen door. At the bottom is a worn collar from a dog who had died in absolute love and infinite devotion– all keepsakes from the life he so loved.

The cherub hides his eyes in grief and humiliation, and then suddenly, the voice of God rings out, proclaiming his to be the most pleasing gift of all.

The box begins to glow, then shine with a brilliant light, blinding the heavenly hosts so that only the Littlest Angel sees it rise up, and up, and up until it becomes a star in the celestial firmament. The star heralding the birth of the baby, leading everyone home.

I come by my unreasonable desire to give meaningful gifts honestly. I spend all week trying to make something beautiful for you.

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

 

Human beings claim to be the only species on the planet capable of feeling awe. I’d add to that distinction an amazing capacity to hold contradictory beliefs and experiences simultaneously. 

The Trinity comes to mind. 

That we will laugh again after a devastating loss.

That we are divine in origin yet hurt each other every day.  

That light is both a wave and a particle. 

A lot of things in my life feel contradictory, such as irreparable rifts with people I love. Case in point: Aren’t “love” and “irreparable” contradictory?  

And the election feels like this to a lot of us. People we are related to, people whose company we enjoy, and people we respect did not vote as we did. And that feels contradictory. How can I like you so much and not think the same way? It’s funny, isn’t it? It’s easier to accept a difference in spiritual beliefs than this political one. Wait. It is a difference of spiritual beliefs. And it’s not easier. And ironically that’s what brought my ancestors and perhaps yours here in the first place. 

In visiting a first cousin who lives in England last summer, I discovered that her husband, a research historian with time on his hands, had documented our grandmother’s family tree back to the Mayflower. Our 10th great-grandfather, Francis Cooke, and his son John, had boarded the Speedwell, which set sail with the Mayflower on August 5, 1620, but Speedwell leaked so badly they had to turn back for refitting. Both ships set out a second time, with Speedwell leaking so badly that again, both ships turned back just 100 leagues past Land’s End, and Speedwell was sold. Twenty people returned to London, but eleven passengers from Speedwell boarded the Mayflower. (Ultimately, the leaks proved to have been sabotage by sailors trying to escape their year-long contracts.) Francis and John entered Cape Cod Harbor on November 11, 1620, so I’m guessing they participated in the first Thanksgiving. In 1621, however, Thanksgiving was simply a meal shared with the Wampanoag to celebrate a bountiful harvest.

The celebration had no religious context for the first couple of years, then it occurred to the grateful they should be thanking the divine. That annual tradition continued informally for over 200 years until President Abraham Lincoln issued an official proclamation in 1863 designating Thanksgiving as our annual national day of gratitude. A day all the states were to stop and give thanks in the middle of a war to dissolve their union….

And in what feels to be a further contradiction, this same President had signed off on the largest mass execution in the nation’s history not two years before, hanging 38 boys and men who fought for their tribal lands in the Sioux Uprising. It was the day after Christmas 1861. The decision and the vision defy imagination.

Even more contradictory, Lincoln commuted the sentences of 262 similarly convicted warriors, studying the evidence in each man’s case and absolving them one at a time. 

We had united in arms to free ourselves from a monarchy only 88 years before, yet here we were already in the middle of a Civil War, half of us trying to break that union and half to preserve it. During this time of contradictory alliances, even within the same family, Lincoln freed the slaves, executing one minority and liberating another.

Human beings are complex, which means humanity is complex. How could it be otherwise? We are driven by neural wiring, hormones, cultures, personalities, the damage we carry, maybe by the very stars under which we were born. 

Your nose is pressed against the glass of now, staring through the present at a future that is yet to be determined. In quantum physics, we could say we are in superposition, which is a phenomenon where an object (the future) has the potential to occupy multiple different states at once, but the object’s actual state is unknown. It’s everywhere and nowhere. In essence, anything could happen because the future is only a wave of could-be. 

  Although we do not understand why, observing the wave collapses the wave. The wave becomes particles— the stuff of matter, the stuff of which stars are made, we are made, and from which everything we call future follows. 

Consciousness is creative. Attention is a powerful tool. Where will you place yours?

How many miracles have you experienced in your life? Every one of them, by definition, contradicted circumstances. The impossible happened! Inexplicably, against all odds—from no way, a way appeared. 

Mom used to look at me when I was grieving over a loss and say, “Life is long.” Other times, presented with the same situation, the response was, “Life is short.”  And both were true.

The rift in our nation has a lot of people satisfied that we have corrected our course and others struggling to believe we are going to be okay. I stand in remembrance that we have healed once before, when the red and the blue were the blue and the grey. I’m in awe.

Place your attention on truth and hope, beloveds.

The future is in superposition. 

Collapse the wave.

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.