The manner of giving is worth more than the gift.
~Pierre Corneille, Le Menteur
As a young bride, I learned that I was in big trouble if I showed up at Aunt Honey’s without a bag of trash. We’re not talking about the coffee-grounds-and-eggshells variety, but the kind made up of boxes, bags and labels from name brand products. Honey, who never shopped, managed to obtain gifts for the family by clipping and mailing product “qualifiers” from the packages to turn this rubbish into mounds of Christmas gifts.
Aunt Honey and Uncle Joe were quite a pair. I don’t know how to describe them. How can I make all the love, pettiness, squabbling, originality, meanness, kindness and humor shine through without making them into either a pair of cranks or an affable Mr. and Mrs. Claus? They drove everyone a little crazy.
Our family party took place on Christmas Eve at the home of Honey’s brother, our Uncle Harry. Once we were all assembled, we were led into the basement, blinded by the lights from Uncle Wayne’s omnipresent movie camera. There, amid the washer, dryer, water pipes and furnace, was Honey’s little workshop. She had once again worked her yearly magic on the family trash, turning discarded packaging into free products and cool gifts.
Honey lived for Christmas Eve, and she began clipping and mailing labels every December 26th. She’d keep it up for an entire year until everyone could count on a newspaper-wrapped stack of crazy, sometimes useful, gifts. We’d sit in our little family clusters tearing at the wrapping to discover toothpaste, laundry detergent, shaving cream, macaroni and cheese, shoe polish, and more.
In 1974, for example, she provided the first two babies in the family with stacks of disposable diapers in a variety of sizes. Each box had the product stamp carefully removed, saved for some future magic. As struggling young teachers, we found her gifts a godsend.
Since Honey was aunt to seven nieces and nephews and their families, she tried to be evenhanded about her gifts, making sure that everything was equal. If she couldn’t get enough of a particular gift, she would hold what she had until the next Christmas when she might have obtained more. One year, she had a huge fiberboard playhouse for each family with kids. At the time, there were four of us. She forced Uncle Joe to assemble them — right there in the game room. As if that were not enough, she topped each house with a little doll in a crocheted dress with its legs neatly tucked into a full roll of toilet paper. The doll held the reins to a huge, inflatable dog the size of a Volkswagen. We could barely move to open our other gifts — and there were other gifts!
Each of us remembers a favorite silly gift, like the Sprout dolls from Green Giant, or the Lucky Charms T-shirts in sizes infant to XXL. There were radio hats advertising beer, nightshirts proclaiming the cleaning power of Tide, toys of every imaginable product mascot, and cookbooks featuring everything from creamed corn to crème de menthe. Not every gift was silly; there were Timex watches and silver napkin rings, tea towels, ornaments, cereal bowls, golf balls, jewelry and games. If it had an advertising slogan or product name emblazoned across it, there was a good chance it was under our tree.
We always brought stacks of gifts for Honey and Uncle Joe, but nothing we ever gave them could equal the pleasure they derived from watching us and our children open the presents they had been gathering all year long. We tried, though. We bought them TV sets and nativity sets, clothes and food. We lovingly made things for them: blankets and potholders, crayon pictures and embroidered pillowslips, homemade jam and nut bread. Honey and Uncle Joe were the heart and soul of our family Christmases, and we wanted them to feel as loved as we did year after year.
I’d like to say that they stayed in the bosom of their loving family until they died at a ripe old age, but it didn’t quite happen that way. Uncle Joe, always suspicious of everyone who had the children he did not, quit coming to the family parties after an imagined slight. We tried to bring him back into the fold, to no avail.
Honey continued to enjoy opening gifts on Christmas or any morning — one morning became like another to her in her final days. I put a tube of toothpaste in my grownup children’s Christmas stockings every year to remind them of Christmases past, when she and Uncle Joe were the cornerstone of our family Christmas Eves.
~Rosemary McLaughlin
