Surprises

Gin

Surprises were a big deal in my family.  Birthday plans and Christmas gifts were always unknowns.  We didn’t have a history of big parties; celebrations were usually family only.  The anticipation for me as a child was always high.  Some of my friends would talk about searching closets and drawers to find hidden gifts. Not me.  I would do nothing to spoil the surprise. You could count on me never to peek until the big day had arrived.

When I was eight we were living on Dewey Avenue in Pittsfield. My parents didn’t own a car. Shopping meant walking to North Street or mail order from catalogues.  My mother had ordered some new dresses for me for Christmas from one of the catalogs, Sears Roebucks or Montgomery Ward.

"I got you something for Christmas but I want to make sure they fit," she told me.  "Close your eyes."

I remember standing in my bedroom with my eyes tightly shut as she pulled one after another over my head.  I could feel the material on my arms and shoulders as I stood very still wondering what color the dress was or if it had bows. Did I open my eyes even a little?  I did not.  To this day I remember trying on those dresses wondering what they looked like.  What I do not remember is opening them on Christmas, wearing them or what any of them actually did look like. What has stayed with me is the anticipation and excitement of trying them on without peeking. That’s where the fun was, not having them but in anticipating them as gifts.

You might think this amount of anticipation could backfire. What if what we imagined would be under the tree wasn’t?  What if something we wanted dearly was out of reach?  I do recall studying intently the fat toy catalogues that would arrive every October from Sears and Montgomery Ward.  There must have been times I wanted something but didn’t get it.  Periodically our family went through tough financial times.  Even though there may have been a Christmas when there were fewer gifts under the tree, I never had any sense of disappointment associated with Christmas.  I recall the fun.  When I became a parent myself, I worried my kids would expect more than what we gave them even though I never experienced this feeling as a child. Was the feeling of excitement the real gift my parents had given me? 

Some surprises were of a different nature. The evening of my eighth birthday started in a typical way for us. Our family consisted of me, my brother and my parents at the time.  As the birthday girl, I got to pick what we would have for supper.  My choice was spaghetti and meatballs with chocolate pudding cake for dessert.  My favorite meal at the time.  Our family had another quirky custom when it came to eating spaghetti.  We had it served to us not in regular dishes but in a variety of mixing bowls, serving dishes and whatever other roundish bowls we could find in my mother’s kitchen.  We each had a favorite.  I used to like mine in an aluminum-mixing bowl.  Perhaps this started because the flat dinner plates were not good at containing the sauce, the best part of my mother’s spaghetti, while the vegetable bowls that came with the dish set were too small.    

I asked for the chocolate pudding cake as dessert because it was served warm. I loved the mix of textures, the dryness and sweetness of the cake contrasted with the warm softness of the pudding. Sometimes my mother served it with whipped cream, sometimes with “hard sauce.”  A funny name, I thought, for something soft and sweet.   Oh. That’s interesting.  I just looked up hard sauce.   It earned the name "hard" not because of its texture but because it is traditionally made with whiskey or brandy!  Oh I see. That kind of “hard.”

My parents were unsure how to announce the time to sing Happy Birthday and give gifts without a traditional birthday cake. A pudding cake was no place for a birthday candle. My father saved the day.  He came in cradling a candle in his hand for me to blow out.

As the four of us sat around the kitchen table, I began to open my presents.  Probably a book, some clothes, a puzzle. Then a large box from my older brother.  "I can't imagine what this could be," I thought. When I opened it I was astonished. Shoe roller skates!  I loved to roller skate!  Up and down the blocks around our house.  I had the usual flat metal skates that attached to your shoes with little metal clamps. You tightened the clamps with a small key. A skate key.  Trouble was no matter how hard you tried to tighten them, the skates would loosen and fall off.  I imagine the vibrations of the sidewalk squares didn’t help much.  Sidewalk roller skating was a very frustrating business. A few minutes of bliss punctuated by long periods of sitting to adjust the skates to get them stay on.  Both my father and brother had been subjected to my pleas innumerable times.  “Make them real tight."  No more of that.  I had shoe skates. This was amazing.

At the moment I was overcome.  Here was something I dearly wanted but had never expected or even asked for.  I had assumed they were too expensive for something so impractical; I'd outgrow them in a year or so. I stared at them in the box overcome with happiness and surprise.  My father impatiently asked, “ Well, what is it?”  I realized I hadn’t taken them out of the box to show anyone else.  I lifted them in the air so my parents could see.  “Wow!”  They were surprised as well.  My parents hadn’t planned this with my brother.  It was a surprise to all of us. 

The gift caused me to question my relationship with my brother. When I was eight, he was thirteen.  We weren’t in the same school, didn’t share the same kind of homework, had very different ideas about what to do with free time. We didn’t play cards or board games together. We each went our own way.  Mostly I think I was a nuisance to him.  Someone he had to babysit for when he would rather be off on his own.  Someone who embarrassed him by hanging around his friends. This gift brought all of that into question. 

“I didn’t think he even liked me and here he gives me this. He saved money from his job to spend on me. He must love me,” I thought. Of course I never said any of this aloud.  I hoped I managed to say, “Thank you. They are wonderful.”  I never had to bother with a skate key again.

My brother’s inclination to surprise people with gifts continued throughout his life.  He lived at home until he was 21, going to college in the evening and working at the GE days, all part of a General Electric engineering apprenticeship program.    

One Christmas Eve, I must have been fifteen, my brother was quite unlike himself, a bit jumpy. He had gone out near the end of the afternoon. When he returned, he began to put the shades down in the living room. My father asked, “What are you doing?  Keep them up so people can see our Christmas lights.”  My brother responded, “Naw. Its cold out.”   My father kind of shook his head, not really agreeing but not wanting to argue.  

We spent Christmas Eve our usual way, mostly waiting for it to be over it seemed to me. Before going to bed, my six year-old sister put out the gifts she was giving for Christmas morning, set out milk and cookies for Santa and hung up her stocking.  We watched a some TV, the nearby tree still mostly empty of gifts except for a few tins of neighbor cookies. My brother, still anxious, turned to me at one point, suggesting, "Christmas will come faster if you go to bed now." Eventually I brought down the gifts I was giving and did go to bed.  Lying there I heard my parents bringing presents down the stairs imagining them filling our stockings. So it was with that familiar excitement I finally fell asleep.

On Christmas morning, my sister woke me.  Together we woke my parents. We knocked on my brother’s door to tell him we were just about ready. We all waited at the top of the stairs in pajamas and robes while my father went down stairs first.  It was his job to make sure the cookies and milk had been replaced with crumbs and an empty glass. “Oh, my!  What is this?” we heard him exclaim. Composing himself, he called us all down.  

There in the middle of the dining room was a new kitchen table and chair set.  It hadn’t been there last night when my parents went to bed near midnight.  My brother had surprised us all.  He had bought the set at Sears, picking it up in his convertible with the top down on a cold Massachusetts December afternoon just as the store closed for the holiday. The reason he wanted the shades down was because the car was parked just up the street from our house with the table legs and chairs sticking out.  After my parents had gone to bed, he crept down the stairs and out of the house to bring in the table and chairs so it would seem to everyone Santa had left it! 

My brother also figured in another Christmas story he told me about when we were adults.  At the time of the story he was nine and I was four.  He had recently figured out Santa was a fantasy that our parents maintained for us kids.  Now that he knew the truth, he was able to participate in the fun of sharing the Christmas magic with me.  A friend of his had a Santa costume.  He borrowed parts of it and on Christmas Eve just as I was falling asleep, he tickled my cheek with the beard while whispering “Merry Christmas, Ginny, from Santa.”  David told me on Christmas morning I excitedly announced to my parents, “Santa came into my room last night!”  Oddly enough his telling me the story didn't trigger any memories of it. In fact the day he related the story to me, he was a bit miffed I had forgotten his efforts to contribute to the Christmas spirit.

I do recall other Santa related stories. One December day my father and I were walking through Newberry’s on the way to the parking lot.  I glanced over at the line of kids waiting to see Santa wondering what they were each going to ask for.  Then Santa looked over at us shouting, “Hello, John. How are you?”  I am thinking, "Wow. Santa knows my Dad by name."  My father looked at me, realized what I was thinking and said, “Well, you are set now, aren’t you?”

I wanted to believe. I worked hard to keep the Santa myth alive by ignoring all the clues that Santa was really your parents. I believed long after I noticed the wrapping paper on the gifts from Santa was the same type as the paper on the presents from my parents. I believed long after I noticed my mother’s handwriting on the presents from Santa.  I believed long after I realized telling my parents what I wanted was as good as telling Santa.  I still held on.  Finally the evidence became so overwhelming I had to admit the truth.  There was a silver lining. My little sister had become old enough so that I could move to the other side of the Santa myth supporting it for the fun of others.  I became the one to help her write the letter to Santa, I filled her stocking. I ate the cookies and drank the milk she left for Santa. The Santa fun didn’t stop. It just shifted

Some surprises were surprises even when there was no event to anticipate.  I recall one time my parents were getting ready for a trip to New York City for a few days.  They would go to Broadway shows and jazz clubs, a holdover from the early days of their marriage.  My brother would be going to sleepover camp while I would stay at my grandparents for the week.  As my parents began to gather suitcases for packing, they discovered one held a collection of things they had bought the previous summer to give us for Christmas but somehow had forgotten.  Now, if this were my husband and I, we would think, “Great.  We have a head start on next Christmas.”  However, this thought never entered my parents' mind. They called us into the living room announcing  this was UnChristmas Day.  My father explained in Alice In Wonderland, Lewis Carol had introduced the idea of unbirthday presents.

They opened up the suitcase. I was surprised to see many of the things we usually got for Christmas. Silly Putty, a paddle with a red rubber ball attached, a gyroscope, a kaleidoscope, a deck of cards with a picture of the Empire State Building on the back, a Slinky, and, my favorite, a set of jacks.

With Silly Putty you could make an imprint of a drawing of some character from the Sunday funnies, then by stretching the Silly Putty you could manipulate the face into all sorts of odd expressions.  My father was always reminding us to put it back in its case after we played with it.  We would agree.  Moving on to another toy we quickly forgot our father's warning. The next day the Silly Putty was as hard as a rock. 

We paddled the ball until the staple connecting the elastic to the rubber ball broke, probably after just a few minutes. The Slinky was amazing to watch. Balancing it from one hand to the other to watch the way the curves of the metal would shift was fun. Better was finding a set of steps just the right height and width so the Slinky would walk down the stairs all by itself.

My mother and I would play jacks many nights after supper.  She was very good. She never just let me win so that when I did win it meant something.  As we sat on the floor playing, she would tell me stories about playing jacks with her uncles when she and my aunt were little girls. Her uncles were very athletic.  One was a well-known golfer at the time.  Another was a college sports manager.  She told me with awe in her voice, “Uncle Don's hands were so large he could easily gather up all ten jacks at the same time.  Evie and I could never win if he was playing. Sometimes we wouldn’t even get a turn because Uncle Don would never miss.  First he gathered them one at a time, then two, then three, completing the run all the way up to ten. Finally the only thing we could do was to play together without him!”

The New York City cards started a long tradition. It was my father who taught me how to play solitaire and rummy, eventually even gin rummy. "Here's a card game named after you," he told me.  We would play at odd moments: waiting for my mother to come downstairs so they could go to the movies, waiting for the TV news to begin, or waiting until everyone was ready to drive up to my grandparents for a Sunday dinner.  Playing cards with me was my father's way of filling up these few minutes.

Dad and I always played for “The Championship of Plunkett Street” or “The Championship of Montgomery Avenue.”   Wherever we were living at the time.  We never did consult with any of our neighbors to see if they wanted to contest our titles!  I still play cards as a way of filling up a few minutes.  As I finish up a task, I’ll glance at my clock on the computer.  If I see it is 9:50 or 10:16, I’ll play computer solitaire until the hour or half-past. I enjoy this.  It reminds me of playing with my father.

Surprise was such a major factor in our family’s gift giving tradition I didn’t realize it wasn’t inherently a part of gift giving in general.  As I grew older and developed relationships outside my family, I discovered some people didn’t place as high a value on surprise. At one of my friend's, their habit was to give each child a catalogue from which they would mark all things they liked, their parents then choosing among the marked items for gifts. This is similar to an early version of a gift registry or Amazon wish list.  I was quite shocked with this approach. Where's the surprise in that?

Early in my relationship with Bill I found out his parents didn’t wrap gifts at all, just put them under the tree for the kids to find Christmas morning. Appalled isn’t too strong a word to describe my reaction to this.  I couldn’t imagine Christmas without the time spent staring at the wrapped presents imagining what wonders they might contain.  Just looking at them scattered under the tree unwrapped didn't match my image of Christmas. When Bill told me about his family's tradition, I was surprised, but not in that good way. As most married couples need to do, over the years Bill and I created our own family Christmas traditions unique to us.

Of course, Bill has a different perspective on this.

Bill 

"Surprises were also an important part of my life.  I didn't like them.  What I remember most about those Christmases in the mid 50's in Hyde Park was the anticipation the night before.  The excitement, the restlessness, the feeling I'm never going to fall asleep.  The next morning we would crowd along the stairs looking into the living room, dark early in the morning before the sun came up.  This was our version of imagining what was under the tree.  We couldn't come into the living room until my mother or father was up too, so we tried to make out what was under there from a vague shape or a glint of random light. If we could determine what something was, a truck or game, then we tried to figure out if it was intended for me or one of my brothers.  Finally, when we could rush over to the tree, unwrapped gifts meant we could play with them immediately, and not have to deal with unwrapping them first.  (Did you ever think of that aspect, Gin?)  Besides, think how much money my parents saved on wrapping paper."

Gin

Yeah, Bill, not just the paper.  What about the tape, the tags, boxes?  Still, I loved the wrapping part.  It kept the surprise.

I had been brought up believing surprise was an integral part of gifting. This has stayed with me even now.  I get my daughter or a friend to order my gifts for Bill so he won’t see any charges on our credit cards.  I pay in cash for gifts in stores for the same reason.  I try to anticipate what someone might want without asking them.  I do sometimes use gift cards, but always feel I have failed in some way if that is my only gift option.  All of these “rules” about giving gifts I have internalized over the years as a result of the value my family put on surprise.

Bill might be surprised to know for me surprise has less to do with anticipation than it does with a sense that something good is about to happen. I still anticipate mail even after years of receiving mostly ads and bills. Every time I go to pick up my mail that optimistic feeling that something interesting, something unexpected, might be in the mailbox has not faded.  Every new day always has the potential for surprise.