When Christmas Couldn't Come

When Christmas Couldn't Come

We lived in the farmhouse until my dad lost his job in 1994. No longer able to afford a mortgage, let alone utilities in the old, drafty house we moved into a smaller house two doors down. My mom called the new house "cozy" - making the best of a situation I couldn't begin to understand; words like "WIC", "welfare" and "debt" meant nothing to me at the time. I missed the barn that longed to be explored, the hill where at eight, I saw my first snowfall and of course, my room. The new house wasn't mine, it was Miranda's, a friend who moved away, my room wasn't mine, it was hers. My mind raced with thousands of questions, all of them pitying myself, feeling bad for Andrea, forgetting about my family, all of them until my mom told the four of us that Christmas couldn't come that year.

The words fell out of my mom's mouth like hail from a winter sky, pelting me in the face, stinging my entire body. What did she mean Christmas couldn't come, that we could no longer afford any "extras", that things were going to be "different"? Instantly my eyes swelled with things unfamiliar to a tomboy, my heart raced my shortening breath as I struggled to empathize with my parents, searching for a question, an answer, something to make it better.

Before that November day I never thought about money or affording things; I grew up in a upper-middle class family where eating out was a commonality, vacations were assumed and for all I knew money could have grown on tress. I was eleven, self-absorbed in wants and wishes where the new house was a drag not more affordable and sharing a room was suffocating, not compromising. Life, for me, had never consisted in cutting corners or working to make ends meet, I simply lived getting what I wanted, not what I needed.

Only after that conversation with my mom, a memory printed indelibly in my mind, did I begin to reexamine the coming holiday, a time once committed solely to sending lists to my dad (who promised he knew Santa) and waking up on Christmas morning to find a glistening tree almost hidden by presents. Only after did I begin to learn what Christmas really meant because when there were no presents, I realized I still had a great gift, five of them actually; my mom, my dad, Chris, Sarah and Alex.