Apple Phones and Oranges
It's Advent, often translated as "frantic pre-Christmas season." I've been on the lookout for Christmas presents for months now, being that as the proud oldest sister of ten (divided out into three households), Christmas shopping is quite the task. Even with the ever-growing Christmas list, I absolutely love the holiday. I think that Christmas, at its best, is an invitation into joy over the greatest gift that can be given, the gift of total self-sacrifice so the people you love can live lives of fullness.
I know, though, that too often, Christmas becomes so much about the presents under the tree that we can completely forget the meaning of giftedness. In the midst of my Christmas shopping, I am in desperate need of that reminder.
One Christmas story helps me to keep my whole view of the season in perspective.
One of our dearest friends when my family and I lived in Mexico was Raul. Raul and his family made our lives so much fuller and more joyful. One year, my mom decided to make a birthday meal for Raul. He wanted something American, so she seared steaks, mashed potatoes, and whipped together a delicious gravy. In the midst of this celebration of his life, Raul told my mom how much he really appreciated this gift of food and companionship.
When he was growing up, his family was incredibly poor. He had gotten used to living with much less and watching his siblings do the same. One year, at Christmas time, a vendor came into town selling jacks. He got super excited when he saw how cheap they were, just a couple of pesos! He ran to his dad to ask if maybe, this year, he could get money for the jacks so that his siblings could have Christmas presents. His dad told him not to be extravagant. That year, Raul and his siblings received the same Christmas present that they always did, an orange each.
Raul shared this story to express how much he appreciated that my mom was going out of her way to give a meaningful gift to him. He understood how special it is to receive presents and gifts on festive occasions.
When I think of his story, part of me is tempted to go toy shopping and find every underprivileged child in town so that they can get a Christmas present. But a bigger part of me realizes how misguided my response is.
Raul is one of the kindest, most joyful, most generous people that I know. He has always treated my family with nothing but kindness, even when our house full of women would call him over for the silliest needs (like getting locked out for the third time that month). What I want is to be more like him, not to find ways to make people who lived like he did more like me.
Please do not mistake me, I very much believe in the goodness of being materially generous during Christmas, and I will get to that in a minute. But I also think that rushing to empty out the excess from my pockets is not the message that I need to hear so that I can be more receptive to the gifts of Christmas.
What I want is to be able to love and be grateful and joyful, and for the material goods that surround me to not hinder that openness.
There were Christmases as a kid where I would sit down afterwards, surrounded by mountains of toys, feeling excitement, sure; but I also would feel this kind of obsession with all of these shiny new things, this unwillingness to share them with my sister Anika. I'd feel so possessive for a month, maybe, when the shiny-newness wore off and I was drooling over the commercials for the newer, shinier Polly Pocket on TV.
The danger, I think, is that at Christmas, we give so many things so that we become numbed by them. That is a numbness I never saw in Raul, even when he was forty something. It's a numbness that I do see in the people rushing for the newest iPhone when their's works perfectly. It's a numbness I'm becoming sensitized to in myself, when I go to a store with a full bank account and thumb through pretty new things that could replace the slightly older things in my closet at home.
Perhaps it is only by getting less of that stuff that I will be able to be more open to feelings of joy and gratitude, and more attuned to the people around me who really are in need of things that I have twenty of.
Part of me wonders whether people worry that their kids will feel miserable if they don't receive all of these fancy new things, like getting a bunch is what makes Christmas this wonderful season. But then I think about my childhood, when I got plenty of fancy new things, and remember what stands out as one of the best Christmas gifts I ever received.
Age six, living in our shoebox apartment in Rome, I asked my mom if we could put together gift bags for the people who begged on the streets. We went to the store, and stocked up on items that would go into these bags, some for adults, others for kids. Anika and I insisted that Kinder Eggs make it into the kids' bags, being that they were our favorite treat. Now I understand my mom's reluctance at first to listen to our request (how can tin-wrapped chocolate stuffed with a cheapo toy cost so much?). But, she paid for the candy anyway as a gift to us.
We went out a few days before Christmas, bags in tow, to ride the Metros across the city. We handed out gift bags and wished a Merry Christmas to the people we encountered. It got late, and we still had a kids bag with us. I wanted to keep riding until we found someone to give it to, but Mom insisted that we head home. We could eat the Kinder Egg ourselves. When we got out at our stop, there was a little family sitting right near the stairs to our street. They hadn't been there before. A woman had her little boy with her, about Anika's age. I ran up and gave him the last bag. I will never forget the look on his face. I forget what was under our tree that Christmas.
It's one thing to hear that there's more joy in giving than receiving. It's one thing to hear that a grateful heart is a joyful heart. It's one thing to hear that you don't need things to make you happy. But it's completely another to do the gifting, to make the space in your heart, and to refuse to let things clutter your life so that you can appreciate whether or not these statements are true.
I wish that Raul could have gotten jacks for Christmas those years ago. I wish that the kids in situations like him will receive a gift they cherish this Christmas. But I also have a wish for those kids' neighbors, the ones who can afford to give Apple phones to their kids. I wish that those kids could be happy with jacks, too. Because it is just true that if those of us with more could learn to be authentically grateful with less, there would be more to go around this Christmas.
When this wish seems untenable, it can help to remember that an orange is enough to make a grateful heart.
