Christmas gift query is the ultimate way to get people sparkling
The little-known fact is that this may be the ultimate key to getting people talking. Whether they’re computer technicians speeding up a network, clients sorting problems before the holidays, friends encountered for present-swapping purposes, or nearest and dearest interrupted as they go through the sports pages, that question gets them all misty-eyed, nostalgic, and talkative.
They don’t necessarily get truthfully talkative. I found that when I asked friends or family to name the best yuletide gift they’d ever received, they tended at first to go squirrelly on me. Eyes sliding furtively and guilty dithers breaking out.
It took a while to become apparent that most of them assumed the questioner — me — was fishing for a compliment about some gift I had given them in the past and despite some anxious mental searching, they couldn’t come up with the right answer or perhaps remember anything I’d ever given them. Which confirms a long-held belief of mine, which is that most of the time when people tell spontaneous lies, they’re not setting out to be evil in their own interests. They’re actually trying to be kind to someone else.
Once they’re let off the hook of believing that they have to remember some gift the questioner gave them, they step back into their personal narrative and you can see the Disney sparkles settling on their hair and eyelashes. It was the bike, they say. Or the skates. Or the dog. They can remember what age they were when they got it. Older than five, usually, and younger than 12.
They can remember whether or not it was wrapped. One friend even remembers the handwritten label on her bike when she found it on the landing on Christmas morning. It may have been the only gift label ever to carry a question: “Santa or Daddy?”
Another friend — a man in his 70s — asked to recall his best Christmas present ever, spoke for more than himself.
“It was the first football we had, me and my five brothers,” he said. “Without a doubt. The first real football.”
He came from a large family in rural Ireland where money was scarce and what would now be regarded as necessities or staples were seen as luxuries.
“Up to then, we’d made our own footballs out of rags wrapped around each other. Same as we did for cricket balls. The following Christmas we got a cricket ball and we couldn’t believe how hard and heavy it was. We had no idea. We’d learned cricket through the radio. ”
Having learned to be extra skilful in order to avoid being hit by a speeding round rock, this man and his brothers later speculated that the West Indians, who were spectacularly successful cricketers at the time, had taught themselves the same skills because they, too, would have been too poor to buy proper protective leg pads.
The most magical present I recall was a miniature sewing machine. I was in love with my mother’s Singer, with its elaborate black wrought iron frame, its broad foot pedal powering the needle as it went up and down so quickly, it wasn’t possible to see each stitch as it was made. That was before my father infuriated my mother by inexplicably painting the whole thing green.
I had wanted the equivalent and there it was on Christmas morning, in transparent cellophane wrapping, from Santa.
THE great thing about Santa was that he gave unconditionally, which is rare among adults. Most adults get generous and conditional in equal measure: “Here’s a new pair of skates, now, remember to wear your helmet and stay beside a grass verge so you can fall on it if you go out of control.” Or “You are not allowed to use your mobile phone when you’re in school, are we clear on this?” Santa never gave conditionally, although he’d have been more entitled to do so than parental givers, since he spent Christmas Eve out in the cold, then coming down roasting chimneys and filling stockings — all against a deadline. He seriously needed a Brendan Ogle-type negotiating better working conditions for him.
But he ho-ho-hoed his way around every challenge and when he gave, gave without strings attached. That, in turn, provided those on the receiving end with total freedom.
Santa didn’t mind, for example, that I never learned to sew using a machine — my own miniature gadget or anything larger. Or in other years, when he gave me exactly what I wanted and I never used it.
One time it was a clarinet. Plastic and somewhat smaller than you’d bring with you to an audition for the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, but a functioning clarinet nonetheless. Later, he gave me a zither. A beautiful, mahogany musical instrument scattered with red roses beneath its deep varnish with a tone like a basso profundo guitar and its own pure bone plectrum.
I had notions of playing the theme music from The Third Man¸ God alone knows why, because I hadn’t seen the movie at that point and haven’t since, either. In reality I never played anything but the odd scale on it, and the same with the clarinet.
My mother, who on every other subject nagged unmercifully, scattering demands for discipline and practice, never said a reproachful word about failure to commit to either the zither, sewing machine or clarinet, which argues enormous self-control on her part: If Santa felt let down, she wasn’t appointing herself as his spokeswoman. She seemed to be his friend, but not his representative.
My father seemed to have much the same relationship with Santa. Each Christmas Eve he would get me and my sister to write our notes and then have our mother supervise us as we threw them in the brightly-burning fire. Miraculously, they never burned — just disappeared straight up the chimney on their way to the North Pole. The fact that my father was standing at the door of the sitting room moving the door in some way that created sudden updraft in the fireplace escaped us.
It’s a conspiracy of sorts, Christmas is. Parents, siblings, believers, and sceptics all playing their parts for the sake of good.
God bless us, every one.
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