Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.
~Author unknown, attributed to a 7-year-old named Bobby
Aunt Betty opened the gift, threw back her head and laughed so hard she snorted. This made the rest of us crack up, too. Then she showed us the Christmas present from Aunt Marcia that had elicited her guffaws.
It was a head — a hideous, plastic doll head. Creamy pink skin, creepy round eyes, and a rug of awful yellow-orange hair. No body, just an oddly square-shaped head, with tissues protruding from the top. Apparently, it was a tissue-box cover. A handwritten note from Aunt Marcia, taped onto it, said: “For your boudoir.” She had tucked it in with other, actually nice, gifts for Aunt Betty’s new house.
The story of the world’s gaudiest tissue-box cover had begun more than twenty years earlier, in the early 1970s. Neighbors had asked then-teenaged Aunt Marcia to watch their dog — The Killer Chihuahua, as Marcia and her older siblings called him. The four siblings (my mom being the oldest) had shared a great laugh when Marcia came home with her beyond-tacky, dog-sitting thank-you gift. Then she tossed it in the back of a closet.
When Aunt Marcia resurrected that crazy-old-tissue-box-head as a holiday gag gift years later, it could have been the end of it. But, no, not in our family. The Head — as we officially named it — took on a wild and wacky life of its own.
My mom’s side of the family was large, so every year we picked names from a hat — each of us getting a Christmas gift only for the person we picked. The year after The Head made its first appearance, Aunt Betty decided to carry on the joke. She gifted it to Aunt Elaine. The next Christmas, Aunt Elaine upped the ante, gifting it to our family angel-collector, Grandma — with handmade wings and halo attached.
Now, it was ON.
We each began to plot and plan when we received The Head. How could we make it even more outrageous than last year? We cringed as we waited to see who last year’s giftee had picked from the hat. Someone was going to get The Head each December 25th.
The Head became an executive one year, complete with shirt and tie, and business cards in its tissue hole. Another year it was a railroad engineer, with striped denim hat and red bandana. It once wore an old-fashioned golf hat, with a red pompom.
One time, jokester Uncle John tucked a cackling Halloween noisemaker into The Head — then wrapped it in a box identical to four other boxes stacked on top of one another. All of Christmas day, before gift-opening time, he would walk by the stack and give it a whack, making it cackle and shake. We all knew The Head was in one of those boxes, but which one, and who was getting it? Torture.
Another year, Grandpa had The Head. Well, Grandma thought it would be hilarious to hide it in the shower, so when my family came to stay overnight on Christmas Eve, one of us would open the shower curtain to a surprise — like a scene from a horror movie. It was me, and Grandma giggled like a schoolgirl at my startled scream.
The kooky tradition of The Head went on for over a decade, and Grandma even recorded in a notebook, with her flawless handwriting, who got it and how it was dressed every Christmas. Our ritual faded out as the family stretched, scattered and aged, and we grandkids started families of our own.
Earlier this year, when I decided to write about this crazy past tradition, I e-mailed family members and asked them to share their favorite memories of it. We had a hilarious e-mail chain and some good laughs reminiscing — which was particularly poignant given my grandparents are gone now.
Then Aunt Marcia decided it was time to tell me the “One Secret of The Head,” as she called it.
The back story: In the mid-1990s, I’d gotten engaged to my college boyfriend of five years — a young man the whole family had gotten to know. The week before wedding invitations were to be mailed, he abruptly called off the wedding and relationship with no explanation. At the time, I was shattered (though, in hindsight, thankful I dodged that bullet). It was my first heartbreak, and it was a doozy. The family came together to console and support me, which I will never forget.
But there was something I didn’t know. That year, Grandma had The Head. In a huge box, she arranged my mother’s wedding dress (which was a 1960s mini dress that would never fit me, as I’m several inches taller than her). Grandma inserted The Head into the wedding dress and sewed a flowing veil to match. She planned to give me this most-elaborate presentation for Christmas, before my early spring wedding. But when my engagement was broken in late fall, she called on my aunts to help her scramble and disassemble her masterpiece. They remade The Head as something else for another family member.
I had no idea until Aunt Marcia revealed the Secret, now decades later. Learning about it, tears welled up in my eyes. I could imagine Grandma working so hard on that wacky-but-touching gift for me. And I can just see her and my aunts frantically taking it apart and remaking it to spare my young, crushed feelings.
Reflecting now on that family secret — and our whole zany holiday ritual of The Head — I see my maternal family in a new light. I appreciate even more the silliness, humor and jokes of that raucous group of relatives. And I also realize that, beneath it all, is a spirit of creativity, graciousness and, most importantly, true family love.
~Megan Pincus Kajitani
