Gift giving, a sage once wrote, “is a complicated ritual. True gift giving is an expression of love. Receiving a gift graciously can also be an act of love.”
The sage was my mother, who passed away almost two years ago. But she wrote those words 46 years ago in a short article she published in NEWmonth, a magazine she helped found and then edited for many years. She didn’t write often, but when she did, the whole family would make a point of reading it. In the December 1978 issue, she published “An act of love,” effectively tying together her past, present, and future.
She recounted how when she was a child, her mother always received a box of chocolate-covered cherries at Christmas: “They were for my mother who pretended to wonder ‘what on earth could be in this box’ and then expressed great pleasure to find her favorite candy. We were delighted to help her consume the sweets.” Her family continued that tradition for years, helped by the fact that a box of chocolate-covered cherries was within the limits even of the children’s constricted buying power.
Then she remembered the Christmas I came into the world. “My favorite Christmas gift was one I received ungraciously eleven years ago,” she wrote. She said “ungraciously” because “I had entered a Madison hospital on Christmas Eve feeling sorry for myself.”
Yes, I was a Christmas Eve baby, arriving a few weeks late, so though I’m sure my mother was looking forward to being done with the pregnancy, it was an inopportune time. Not only had she been baking and decorating and all-around preparing for the family’s first Christmas in their new home outside Madison, Wis., but Christmas Eve proved to be bad timing at that hospital. She later told me that the doctors and nurses were all busy at their own Christmas party, and she had to threaten to leave and go to another hospital before they would pay attention to her.
But they did, and obviously I was born. “At 3 a.m., as nurses were returning me to my room, they stopped in the hall for a moment and one leaned over and deposited my newborn son in my arms,” Mom wrote. “I murmured, ‘Hello, John.’ He turned his dark-fringed head and gravely studied my face.”
Even as a kid, I could be too serious.
“For eleven years I’ve had the pleasure of watching this baby grow into a very special person. On your birthday, John, I’d be delighted to receive a box of chocolate-covered cherries.”
True gift giving is an expression of love. Receiving a gift graciously can also be an act of love.
And so, for more than a decade after that article was printed, every year I’d add a box of chocolate-covered cherries to whatever Christmas gift I had for my mother. But it wasn’t just me; my siblings, my mother’s siblings and her parents often would also give her boxes of the sweets, so for many years, we’d end up with three or four boxes of them sitting around the house at Christmas time. My mother definitely did not have a sweet tooth, so I imagine she took some of them to work and pawned them off on coworkers.
My mother wrote her article seven years after her mother had died, and she wondered about her mother “whether she really liked chocolate-covered cherries all that much.” I pondered the same thing over the years about my own mother. At some point, I think it was around college, I neglected to continue including them in my gifts to her, and the tradition died away. But rereading her article and seeing that her point was nothing about the chocolate-covered cherries but about the act of love that is receiving a gift — a toy, a book, a child, cherries — I wish I had continued giving her chocolate-covered cherries every year.
I’m touched to reread “An act of love” and see her refer to me as a gift. I was, in fact, an unplanned child, and one that put a strain on a marriage that would break down three years later. Some parents would have resented that “gift,” but not my parents.
I’ve always had a poor relationship with gifts. Once I grew out of my childhood greed — oh, boy, presents! — I settled into more of an overly analytical approach to any gift I received. Even if I truly loved the gift, my reactions were likely to be subdued and the gift giver didn’t receive the pleasure of knowing that I did, indeed, appreciate the gift. I’ve also had a spotty record of giving gifts that really communicated how much I cared for the persons receiving them.
Other than my first bicycle, I don’t remember any of the Christmas gifts from my mother. None. But I have always remembered her December 1978 article, and it makes the whole point of gift-giving have meaning again for me.
So if my family members start to occasionally receive a box of chocolate-covered cherries from me at Christmas time, they know why.