In early December, I found a large box on the front porch waiting in the rain. With our nearest family five states away, Christmas typically arrived this way: one box at a time, sometimes two, the gifts prewrapped by the jolly elves of Amazon and Toys “R” Us. But this box was unlike any other. I stopped the car in the driveway and stared at it, the wipers working back and forth. About the size of a mini-fridge, the box looked as though it had been dragged behind the UPS truck after being used to smuggle medical waste between rival third-world countries. The cardboard was so thickly wrapped with packaging tape, not only along the seams but across the lids and side panels, that the rain dipping onto the corner from the porch overhang had little discernible effect on the box’s integrity. The rain certainly didn’t make the thing any worse. I didn’t need to read the shipping label to know who it was from. Only my dad, whose forty-year career selling paper and printing granted him unimpeded access to brand-new, never-before-creased-or-folded boxes of every conceivable shape and size, would go out of his way to send Christmas presents to his grandsons in the ugliest container he could find.
I had to bear-hug the thing in order to lift it and then waddle backward through the front door and the archway into the living room. Once I made it to the kitchen table, I needed a hacksaw to get through all the layers of tape. At last I parted the flaps, dug down through several sheets of crumbled pages of the Orange County Register, and extracted from the depths of the cardboard the following items:
I dialed my dad’s number in California. “The box made it,” I said.
“Good,” he replied cheerily. “Lots of good stuff in there, huh?”
I was holding one of the masks, massaging my thumb along the cracks in the rubber strap. “You remember where we live?” I asked. “Not much diving up here. At least not during the winter.”
“I thought the boys could play with the masks in the tub,” he said.
“They’re adult-sized. The boys are six and three.”
“Bah,” he said. “They’ll grow into them. Kids that age, they grow faster than you can believe.”
I wrapped the masks and arranged them toward the back of the Christmas tree.
I didn’t know what else I’d expected the box to contain. My father wasn’t ignorant of fashion or incapable of picking up hints, but he’d sucked at gift-giving all of my life. It was as if the ritual of exchanging presents on holidays defied some internal logic in him. The first Christmas after he and my mother were married, he gave my mom a socket wrench set. For her birthday in March, a shotgun. My mother went into labor with me on their second wedding anniversary, so I got him off the hook, but by Christmas he was back in form. My mother bounced me in her lap while she opened her shiny new chainsaw.
My mom vowed Devin and I would never know such sorrow. She made sure our presents were not only exactly what we wanted but elaborately arranged to maximize the wow factor. As an art major who worked in interior design and later event planning, she had an eye for presentation. I’d bound into the living room to find Skeletor and He-Man swashbuckling on the drawbridge of Castle Grayskull, candy and cassettes spilling from my stocking. The year I asked for a tent in anticipation of a scouting trip, I turned the corner on Christmas morning onto an entire campsite on the living room floor. The tent was outfitted with a sleeping bag, an electric lantern, a folding pocketknife, and an aluminum canteen. The only thing missing was the fire.
Dad sat cross-legged on the floor sipping coffee and taking pictures, as surprised as I was by what had emerged from the wrapping paper. When it was my mom’s turn to open her presents, she tried to hide her chagrin: an ironing board cover, a paperweight the shape of a gigantic clothespin, a book titled How to Speak Southern purchased at the Atlanta airport on the way home from a business trip. “Muchabliged,” she said, grinning through her teeth.
Once Dad moved to California, my mom could no longer shield my sister and me from our father’s gifts. My stepmom had never bought presents for a teenaged boy before, so when it came to me, she deferred to my dad. He did most of his “shopping” at work, since his company, in addition to printing business forms and brochures, screened corporate logos on the knickknacks handed out at trade shows. Over the years I collected a cornucopia of ballpoint pens, miniature flashlights, key chain compasses, ceramic mugs that changed colors when filled with hot liquid. Even the remote-controlled Lamborghini, a gift I leapt onto the floor to play with, was papered over with American Express decals.
I moved to California the week after I turned eighteen, six weeks before I was to begin college at the University of California, Irvine, a half hour to the north and east of my dad’s house. The summer swimming season had ended, and the college season would commence with the start of classes. I felt I needed to arrive on campus in the best possible shape. I swam in the mornings at the local high school, exercised with stretch cords and hand weights in the backyard, and at night, after my dad and stepmom had gone to bed, ran a six-mile loop through Laguna’s eucalyptus-lined streets, into downtown, along the boardwalk at Main Beach, and then up the hills back toward home. In between exercising, I painted my dad’s house and I ate. I was always hungry, and my bottomless appetite shocked my stepmother. She could never buy enough groceries. When I returned home for Christmas my freshman year, most of my presents were food. I received a cheese sampler, as well as a sleeve of spaghetti noodles and a jar of marinara sauce. The next year the cheese was accompanied by a three-foot Hickory Farms summer sausage, a full yard of cellophane-sheathed meat. I took the sausage back to school where my roommates used it to mime a series of sexual gestures so obscene that I could not bear to eat it.
The Christmas before I left California for Utah to begin graduate school, I received the usual haul. The cheese sampler had become by that point a tradition, as had the orange in the toe of my stocking. The tree had been mostly cleared out when my dad passed me a narrow rectangular box, the size and shape of a Maglite flashlight, which I thought would be cool to have. The box thunked against the floor when I set it down. I tore into the paper and extracted a Ziploc baggie filled with spare change, mostly dimes and nickels but some quarters, too. The money was the sum contents of his car’s ashtray, a stash I was ordinarily forbidden to touch. I spent it all in a single night at the Laundromat, eating the cheese while my clothes tumbled around in the dryer.
Katherine read about an annual Dickens Christmas festival in Ripon, an hour south of Appleton. I imagined storefront windows twinkling with lights, bonneted women in pagoda sleeves and tatted collars, men in top hats and ascots and pince-nez caroling along the snow-dusted sidewalks. We drove down on a Saturday morning. We arrived too late for breakfast with Santa, in the Ace Hardware, so we opted instead for the parade of historic homes. The woman who sold the tickets saw Galen and Hayden sitting in the back seat and said, “Children aren’t allowed.”
“No?”
“Too many temptations for busy hands. You and your wife could go one at a time.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “We’ll go somewhere else.”
We headed to the craft show at a place called Maplecrest Manor, which turned out to be the nursing home across the railroad tracks from the grain cooperative, a squat, dim building so acrid with urine and decay that we didn’t make it past the front desk. A mile from the highway, I considered turning toward home, but after driving all the way down here and with a storm moving in, we had to at least see something. We decided to check out the nativity exhibit at the Episcopal church. We followed a hand-lettered sign through the narthex and sanctuary to a yellowed flight of stairs leading to a basement room with a ceiling low enough to create a static current between the asbestos tiles and my hair. I’m not sure what, by that point, I expected, but I suppose I descended the stairs hoping to find live animals and human actors dressed up like Mary and Joseph and the Wise Men.
A dozen folding tables had been set up end to end, and the Ripon townspeople had all brought in their personal nativity scenes—the holiday decorations that graced the sofa table from Thanksgiving to New Year’s and spent the rest of the year in a soggy cardboard box in the basement. The woman guarding the entrance wore a Christmas tree sweater and beamed with pride at the spread. Eyeing the boys, she reminded us that the nativities were for eyes only, but in the corner they’d find some wooden trains and books. They could have a cookie afterward, if they behaved. “The Dickens festival isn’t really good for kids, is it?” I said.
“There was breakfast with Santa,” she said. “Did you make it to that?”
“I’m afraid not.”
She shrugged, and I paid the small entry fee. My plan was to stroll up and down the aisles, declare this one, this other one, and oh, wait, this one over here, my top three, loudly enough for the woman to hear, and then get the hell out of there. Katherine led the boys to the play area. All the fruitless driving around, I could tell, was staring to wear her out.
“Five minutes,” I said.
I walked with my hands behind my back, dipping forward to read the typed three-by-five index cards that captioned each scene. The first one read:
Bob gave this nativity set to Barb for Christmas in 1967. I think he bought it on sale at Dillon and Vosburg’s. Bob doesn’t remember where he bought it, but then again, Bob doesn’t remember much these days.
How could I not read the next one?
My brother-in-law used to date a woman from Bolivia, and one year they decided to spend the holiday there. I asked her to bring me back a nativity set. I didn’t think she would do it, but she did. My brother-in-law has dated a lot of women over the years, but I’ve never liked any of them as much as that girl from Bolivia.
Katherine glanced up from the picture book she was reading to the boys and caught me laughing. I waved her over, and together we roamed from nativity to nativity, tilting to examine the sets’ constructions, their colors and arrangements, and to read the cards. Five minutes turned into an hour. The longer I read, the more the captions began to feel like a conversation among neighbors, full of inside jokes and allusions lost on outsiders. It was one of the things I loved about Wisconsin, along with its dense trees and striking winter light: its deeply ingrained sense of community. Galen and Hayden, to my stunned delight, remained occupied by the books and trains, and on our way out the old woman praised our good parenting and told us to make sure we each got a cookie.
Coming up from the church basement, I took Hayden outside while Katherine led Galen to the potty. The snow looming all day had finally started to fall, the first flakes big and wet and the air now ripe with brine, strong enough to remind me of the ocean in winter. Watching the cars move through the snow, the December sky washed-out and flat, I thought of how, on Christmas afternoons when I was a teenager, once all the presents were opened, my dad and stepmom and sisters and I would walk down to the beach before we settled into eating and watching whatever movie was showing on TV. Winter tide could swell high enough to crash over the stairs, leaving them slick with wet sand and depositing sea urchins in the rock depressions near the base of the cliffs. The beach was usually deserted except for the two Labrador retrievers, Beau and Max, who lived in one of the big houses overlooking the sand. Their owner threw tennis balls into the ocean with a long-handled plastic launcher, and the dogs charged right in after them, diving headlong through the shore break, impervious to the cold. If we walked down later in the afternoon, we’d catch the start of dusk, the horizon going orange and purple over the outline of Catalina Island, twenty-two miles across the sea. As the light faded, I’d begin to feel sad. The sun setting meant I’d soon zip my meager gifts inside my suitcase and fly back to Texas. The long countdown to the next time I saw my dad, in August, would begin all over again.
Devin and I spent a lot of Christmases on airplanes, flying on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day because where we spent Christmas morning was a point of contention between our parents. We met other kids winging between one parent and another, all of us pawns in custody cases of varying sorts, and once an old lady told the flight attendant to bring us milk instead of the Cokes we’d asked for, patting my sister’s hand, promising to look after us until the flight crew handed us over to our dad. One Christmas Eve when Devin and I were on separate flights, an ice storm shut down the Dallas–Fort Worth airport, where I was supposed to change planes. I pooled in with two brothers and hopped a cab across the city to Love Field, Dallas’s smaller airport, and made it out on Southwest Airlines. The next morning, I awoke grateful to simply be in a place on Christmas where I knew the people in the other room. The boxes beneath the tree were gravy.
The thing that bothered me about my dad’s god-awful gifts was that I’d never really wanted anything in the first place. I wanted stuff in the way that all teenagers did, I suppose, but when I looked forward to going to California for the holidays, presents were never a part of it. But when it came time to leave, I had nothing to show for it except an odd assortment of junk poached from corporate trade shows. As though my dad’s house were a place I’d gone to transact some vague business rather than my second home.
Standing in the snow outside the Episcopal church, the windshields in the parking lot starting to glaze with frost and snow, I thought ruefully about how I didn’t own a single thing I’d received for Christmas as a kid. Everything had been eaten or dropped into a coin-operated machine or simply thrown out; I certainly didn’t have anything worth displaying at a town holiday festival, an object worthy of being called an heirloom. My father’s gifts had been tangible symbols that had to stand in his place during the long months we were apart. Because he hadn’t spent much time choosing them, I’d worried that he didn’t spend much time thinking about me. Or now my boys. His grandsons.
I jostled Hayden into his car seat and started the engine and cranked the heat. I was scraping the fresh top layer of ice from the windshield when Katherine and Galen came out. Katherine saw my face and asked, “Are you okay?”
“Peachy,” I said.
She shook her head. “Christmas.”
“Exactly.”
Our cable subscription included a DVR. Galen was proving himself more adept at the system than either of his parents. He’d figured out how to record his favorite shows and pause on his favorite commercials. Since his birthday in August he’d been fetching me from the kitchen or the basement in order to show me an ad for a Thomas the Tank Engine train table. It was the size and shape of a foosball table, though only a foot off the ground. It wasn’t cheap and I’d been on the fence about getting it, but one night the week after the Dickens Festival I left work early and drove out to Toys “R” Us. I came home with the table as well as a hundred-piece train set. I hid the boxes beneath a plastic tarp in the back of the garage and hauled them inside on Christmas Eve after we’d put the boys to bed. The table pieces, when spread out, covered most of the living room floor. Beside the open box were a dozen miniature baggies filled with screws so tiny they looked like chia seeds through the plastic. Thankfully, the set included a tiny screwdriver and a tiny Allen wrench, each the size of a stick of gum. I stayed up until two in the morning fitting the pieces together, jigsawing the tracks into place and arranging the scenery: the fueling station beside the airport; the tunnel through the mountain; Sir Topham Hatt, the station master, waving from the platform beside the depot. It was a staging my mother would have admired.
The boys woke us up about forty-five minutes after I’d fallen asleep, yelling from their beds. I descended the stairs with my temples pressed between my fingers, one eye crusted shut. I brewed coffee and slid the camera battery into the slot. Settled into position, camera at the ready, I blew the wooden train whistle that had come with the set.
“You hear that?” Katherine said from the top of the stairs. “What’s that noise?”
“Trains!” Galen hollered. The staircase shook as they thundered down it. For a few minutes it was as glorious as I’d imagined. The boys jumped and screamed and zoomed the trains along the tracks. But with other presents waiting and their stockings overflowing with candy, the table could only hold their attention for so long. They emptied their stockings onto the floor. Bows shot across the living room. The train table turned into a landfill for discarded scraps of wrapping paper.
I waited until every other gift had been opened to slide the scuba masks around from the back of the tree. I hoped the boys would be so saturated with presents they wouldn’t have any interest in them. They’d blithely toss them to the pile like the garbage they were. Instead they put them on and stomped around the living room, pretending the masks were space helmets. The jetsam from my father’s garage! I couldn’t help feeling a little indignant, even if I knew the boys didn’t attach the same symbolic importance to their gifts that I once—and, apparently, still—attached to mine.
As I watched the boys moonwalk across the couch, I thought again of the beach below my dad’s house, all the languid, low-tide afternoons I spent snorkeling in the reef, in all likelihood in one of the masks the boys were wearing, descending toward the rippled bottom to fetch the towel that was now on my basement shelf. I had a thousand memories like that one: waking up before dawn to go surfing at Trestles, the Old Spaghetti Factory in Newport where Dad liked to eat on Saturday nights, drinking triple sec on his living room floor and listening to the Everly Brothers the night I got dumped by my first college girlfriend. The gigantic box of cast-off junk was perhaps his way of sending those memories back to me.
The boys, of course, had no idea about what I was feeling, nor did I want them to. I wanted Christmas to remain as uncomplicated as possible. The table and trains would wait for them.
Over the years, I grew to love the day after Christmas much more than the day itself. St. Stephen’s Day in Europe, Boxing Day in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia, in America it’s a non-holiday holiday, a day off wanted simply for its proximity to the biggest day of the year.
The boys were once again awake before six, but this time, instead of going downstairs, they crept one at a time into bed with Katherine and me. Our queen-sized bed was plenty comfortable for the two of us, but a sardine squeeze with four. But once they settled in, they fell back to sleep. I lay beside them, smelling their foul breath and listening to their rhythmic snuffling. Their mother’s hair filled up the horizon beyond their heads. Snow whitened the window screens. There was nowhere we were expected to be. No planes to catch. No trains, either. Give me ten more minutes like this, I thought, and I’ll never want anything again.