By Seán Malone and John Sweetman
Seán and I have been exchanging gifts for years. Usually, these are things we make or special odd things we acquire that would not make sense to others.
I suppose this may have started in our early childhood when we began thinking about Christmas in July or August by earning money picking berries, stripping cascara bark, and doing chores for neighbors. We made things with what we had and each gift for our parents, siblings, and others was something unique, made with consideration and regard.
The gifts were sometimes crude, depending on the young age and yet undeveloped skills of the sibling, but special nevertheless. Sometimes, older siblings were recruited by younger ones for help and had to display a certain “detachment” from the gift, as gifts were to be a surprise.
I always wondered about this “gift giving” origin and my sister and brother wondered along with me. The younger sister was too young to care at this point.
We had all been told the Christmas story, and all the churches were stocked with Christmas créches with the holy family gathered around some hay-filled crib with the plastic or ceramic baby (Christ), along with some motley animals and three “Wise Men” with moth-eaten camels.
The deal was that these three wise men were bearing gifts from afar. We kids pondered the gifts of “frankincense, gold, and myrrh” with some bemusement even at that time. At that young age, we questioned these items.
“Why didn’t these guys bring oranges, walnuts, and that pecan brittle like we get?”
“After all, they were supposed to be wise men and came from afar … wherever that was.”
“Where is the caramel popcorn?”
“What about the Christmas tree?” All logical questions youngsters would pose.
Well, life passed on and we all grew up a bit, but the gift-giving skepticism remained. We always exchanged gifts, but while it may have been fun to get a BB gun and an erector set, it was much less fun to get socks and underwear. My sisters were happy with the new shoes, and once my little sister got a violin. She may have been happy, but the rest of us were not. The cats left the house during her practice. I think the violin went the way of the ill-fated accordion my other sister got one year.
My brother got a bike, which I borrowed often, and the downhill speed and lack of suitable braking eventually led to us both being Porsche fanatics, which, while dangerous, did not lead to a bad thing, so much as it turned out to be an expensive thing. After all, we had shared gravel burns and bruises, mutually did maintenance, and added “hot bike” things we ordered from comic book ads.
Years later, my brother gave me a Porsche 1600 super engine that we built up and put in my VW van I had brought back from Turkey.
Much later, my sisters and I were in Spain, and we naturally visited all the old churches from Pamplona to Seville and others obscure and further south. At one point, at an old church in Huelva, we pondered a question: “How is it that every church has a piece of the actual cross and various relics of the saints like a ‘knucklebone,” but none have any relics of these original gifts to the Christ child?”
So, what happened to these valuable gifts of frankincense, myrrh, and gold? No church had any of these in those little glass alcoves. If these Eastern wise men had been wise, they would have brought the new mother a bunch of clean nappies, a hot meal, and day care. But no one knows what became of these gifts.
We’ve found the shroud of Turin, but no one has found a used diaper from that birth. There must have been quite a pile of them, judging by our experience with baby things. Go figure. So, our skepticism was aroused, but not in the sense that gift giving was invalid or not to be observed.
Seán and I keep up the spirit of gift giving every year. We make things for one another. One of my most treasured gifts from him was a simple bird suet feeder, made of zinc screen and copper wire. Despite the gnawing predations of our squirrel clan, it has stood up to task.
One year, I made Seán a doorknob out of a particularly neat piece of naturally curved madrona (and better yet … installed it), and another year I made him a crow to put on his deck. It was made from fine cedar I snagged from the L&S scrap bin. Last year, he gave me a bottle of Sarvis berry wine he had made 20 years ago. It was still good, even excellent! And better yet because I may have helped him harvest the berries. We probably still have stains from picking. Small gifts, but meaningful.
This year, I’m working on something for him that I’ve got to get finished so I don’t have to resort to giving him socks and underwear. We can’t afford the “myrrh, frankincense, and gold” thing, but sometimes a decent bottle of our favorite single malt scotch shows up. And we give a toast to have another Christmas together.
