Spirit of Christmas
Every year she asks me to take her shopping. And I always look forward to it.
She can’t drive so she depends on me to carve a day out of my busy schedule for her. She doesn’t work so she scrapes together money for gifts by doing odd jobs and holding a garage sale in the summer.
She’s only 10 years old.
My youngest daughter likes to do her shopping at Santa Express, the little holiday shop that is for children only. It is staffed by volunteers. Prices start at 50 cents and nothing costs more than $7.50. The money goes to support the Vanessa Behan Crisis Nursery in Spokane.
Each year we drive downtown, have a little lunch or a late breakfast, and she shops.
At Santa Express she leaves me and is assigned to another adult who has volunteered to be a shopping assistant; an elf. The adult guides her and helps her select things for the people on her list, and then helps her wrap those gifts while I wait on the other side of the curtain. She returns to me, a sack full of wrapped packages in her hand. On the way home, she holds up each package and tells me what she bought for everyone.
That’s my favorite part of the day.
When she talks about the things she bought, things that didn’t cost a lot of money but were chosen as carefully and lovingly as the rarest and most expensive gift, her face is open and sweet.
She doesn’t complain about the icy weather, the slow traffic or how many people she has to buy for. She isn’t jaded by all the things that bury the Christmas spirit in an adult’s heart. She just wants to give something to the people she loves.
We’ve talked about where her money goes; about the fact that the money she spends helps keep the Vanessa Behan Crisis Nursery open for children in need, but she doesn’t really grasp what that means. She can’t clearly picture a place where children go because there is no other safe place for them.
Last year, in the days before Christmas, she could barely contain her excitement. She had picked out something special for me and she couldn’t wait for me to see it.
On Christmas Day we all exchanged our gifts and she stood beside me as I opened the package she had slipped under the tree. Inside, in a velvet-lined box, was a pen and pencil set.
As I admired her gift, she pressed close and looked at me with earnest hazel eyes.
“I got them for you because you’re a writer,” she told me.
Holding the pen in my hand, I thought about the keyboard I use for hours each day, about the screen that shows my words almost as fast as I think them.
I thought about how often those words are about her.
I put the pen to a piece of discarded wrapping paper. The ink rolled across the smooth surface, curving and looping, spelling out what is tattooed on my heart; the words I hope I’ve written on hers: I love you.
We made our trip to Santa Express last week. A woman who volunteered her time helped my daughter shop.
Across town a harried young mother placed her child in the arms of another volunteer, in a room that is warm and safe and comforting.
As I rush around shopping and wrapping, preparing for Christmas, I try to remember that other mother.
I look for traces of the true spirit of the season in the midst of the chaos and commercialism that assault me everywhere I go, and I’m struck again by the power in the simple gift of a child.
The power of love.