The 13th Gift (23 page)

“Just be thankful for their effort,” Charlotte says, before leaving. “Your true friends obviously wanted you to have a Merry Christmas, and you are.”

Ben, Nick, and Megan open one gift each before going to bed—new pajamas—a tradition in our family since they were toddlers. Megan curls up on the couch and closes her eyes, but she refuses to go to bed.

“Maybe the gift givers will come tomorrow,” she says.

I answer, “Hope so.”

“Well, they remind me of Santa Claus. Maybe this is just something we’re supposed to believe in, like a miracle.”

I don’t think she’s far from the truth.

“This is how legends begin,” I say.

I plant a kiss on her cheek and point her in the direction of her bed.

“It’s cool having our own family legend,” Nick says, following her up the stairs. “Somebody ought to write a book about it.”

Uncle Tom and his computer-literate son, Tommy, return an hour later to assemble the computer system and a new desk. Ben helps them while I busy myself wrapping presents. I lay out the holiday paper, scissors, and tape on the living room floor where I can still keep an eye on the window. I remember Megan sitting by her wide-open window, asking our true friends to stop bringing the gifts that she feared were painful for me even though they meant so much to her—it was just a few nights earlier, but already it feels like so long ago. Now, I crack open the window just a sliver so I will hear any activity on the porch.

I wrap a basketball for my daughter, the boots, videos, and lots of blue jeans and sweaters. I shove Nick’s television into an extra-large trash bag and tie bows around it. Ben’s car stereo fits snugly into a gift bag. Because she loves to sing so much, I had gone back to the electronics store and bought the karaoke machine for Megan.

“Get some rest,” Tom says, surveying the avalanche of presents threatening to crash down on Nick’s electric train, which is still chugging around the tree.

Sometime after four thirty a.m., I fall asleep sitting upright
on the living room couch, still hoping that our anonymous elves will appear.

Chimes from the bells of St. Francis Church drift in through the open window, waking me on a beautiful Christmas morning. The sun I have longed to see for weeks shines today, and the world outside my window is painted with a thin coating of snow.

I am tired and don’t want to move off the couch, but I have to look. Wrapping an afghan around my nightgown, I step outside.

There are no footprints in the snow, no twelfth gift waiting.

The disappointment is striking, a blow.

I return to the house, close the window, and curl back onto the couch.

Is it selfish of me to want more?

Our true friends gave us kindness, unsolicited, but desperately needed. Their gifts were a sign that even our shattered home could be put back together—with community, with family, and with love. They had given us back Christmas, and each other. Our true friends had broken the hold grief had on us and gave us an extraordinary experience during a holiday season that otherwise would have been bleak. They had given us our own Christmas legend, as Nick had called it, a modern-day miracle. That’s a lot to accomplish in twelve days. Was this precious lesson the twelfth gift?

I throw off my blanket, slip into my robe, and turn on the tree lights. Two weeks ago I couldn’t face the holidays; now I
can’t wait for the kids to wake up. At last, I understand the message our gift givers sent. I just needed time to figure it out.

I flip on the oven, light a burner on the stove, and plug in the waffle iron in one fluid motion, then grab eggs, ham, and a tube of cinnamon rolls from the fridge. Bella begs to go outside, so I oblige while reading the directions on the back of a box of Belgian waffle mix.

I glance out the kitchen window when our dog starts howling, generally a sign Bella wants back in the house, or there’s a full moon. She is sitting on the back deck next to something, but her body is partially blocking my view.

I run out the door in my bathrobe and slippers. An artificial pine, less than a foot tall, sits on the deck. The tree is trimmed in brass bells. I don’t bother to count the ornaments as I carry the little tree inside. I know there are twelve.

I remove the pine-scented candle from the table and make this little tree our new centerpiece. My hands tremble as I open the card.

I find another message on the back.

“We hope in some way we have made your Christmas a little easier. Someone did this for us once. You are in our thoughts and prayers.”

The note was signed “Your friends.”

I sit down at the table weak with realization. Throughout these last few months, our pain had been paramount. I had imagined our gift givers as generous people, but ones who were happy and whole, strangers to loss.

How silly of me.

They knew the power of the twelve gifts because they had endured the same pain. Their compassion for us had grown from a deep knowledge of the sweetness and sorrow of the season, when joy and grief intertwine.

I am warmed by the idea that someone helped them survive it, just as they had helped us. I imagine the legacy of the gift givers stretching back over centuries to the very origin of the song and beyond.

Next year, it will be our turn to sing, our turn to carry on this tradition of kindness and giving.

Perhaps it’s the scent of the cinnamon rolls that wakes my children. I’d like to think it part of our Christmas miracle that
they appear at that moment. I can feel the tears pricking my eyes as I hug them each, but today they are tears of joy. I lead them to the table and show them our beautiful little tree.

“I want to tell you the story of the thirteenth gift,” I say.

They gather around me and listen.

T
HE MAGIC OF
that Christmas stays with us today, many years later. Retelling the tale of the thirteen gifts is as much a part of our family tradition as trimming the tree.

Seated around the dining room table that morning in 1999, Ben, Nick, Megan, and I had committed our lives to carrying forward the lessons of our gift givers, but in our own special way.

Everyday can be Christmas. Megan came up with that motto.

I never stopped searching for the identity of the gift givers whose kindness helped my family to heal. They had given us new memories and a very special holiday tradition, but I still felt stuck, unable to fully move on without knowing who they were.

I needed to thank them.

I had long suspected my sister-in-law Dorothy knew more about this mystery than she let on. Could she and David have
deposited the tree with twelve brass bells on the back deck, while all eyes were focused on the front of the house?

Over the years, I had questioned Dorothy, but she declared her ignorance time and again.

At a family gathering in the summer of 2013, I asked her one more time. I told her my desire to share our story so others could learn the lessons that had so benefited us. When she tried to change the subject, I didn’t let up like I usually do. I couldn’t.

With her elbows on the picnic table and her face in her hands, she obviously was conflicted. I could also tell she knew the truth.

“Please,” I said. “I need to meet them.”

She took a deep breath, and then, she surprised me.

“I’ll ask them if it’s okay,” she said.

I did a little happy dance there under the awning, surrounded by submarine sandwiches, birthday cake, and family.

“This means so much to me,” I said.

We cried together that day, but just a little. I didn’t know who our gift givers were—yet—but my arms were extended, and the golden rings were finally within reach again. I felt giddy and nervous, but hopeful that these generous friends would grant my wish.

A few weeks later, I got a brief telephone message at work from Dorothy.

Our true friends now had names: Susan and George Armstrong of Kettering, a community not far from where we lived in Bellbrook. They had lived only a few miles away all these years. Had we passed each other in checkout lanes, met at the gas pumps, dined in the same restaurants? I saw their goodness in everyone I met.

With their identity revealed, I couldn’t wait to see their faces.

On a sunny Saturday in March 2014, Nick and I met them face to face to share a cup of coffee and conversation. Sweet, kind, generous, and funny, they are treasures. Susan is a retired social worker, and George, a retired high school art teacher. Now in their midsixties, the couple has played Secret Santa to twenty-two grieving families, with help from their children: Noah, Zachary, and Natalie. Our family was the ninth to benefit from their healing generosity. In recent years their grandson Jackson also has joined their elf pack.

“Why us?” I asked.

Susan told me that she and my sister-in-law have been lifelong friends. She had known Rick’s family since he was a skinny second grader.

“I just remember him as this cute little kid running around the yard,” Susan said. “When we heard that he had died, we decided right away that we wanted to do this for his family.”

“We couldn’t believe someone so vivacious could be gone,” George added.

The images Nick and Megan conjured of the gift givers having ninja skills weren’t far off the mark. While Susan or George drove the getaway car, their kids dressed as ninjas or G.I. Joes, running across lawns, jumping fences, sometimes crawling on their bellies to avoid detection. Their parents would wait up the street with the car motor running and doors open so their children could jump in quickly.

It was their daughter Natalie, then age seven, whose face I saw smiling up at me through the window of Nick’s bedroom right before I fell. We didn’t find our twelfth gift until
Christmas morning, but Zachary had deposited it on the back deck the night before. Our lookouts had made his job difficult.

“He had to cut across yards and sneak around the back of the house,” George said. “It seemed like we waited forever for him.”

As for the clues on the cards we tried so hard to decipher, there weren’t any, only healing words.

“How did you know exactly what we needed?” I asked.

That is when Susie told me that their tradition of holiday gift giving had begun as a way to honor the short life of a baby daughter and sibling, Andrea Erin Armstrong.

“I woke up feeling funny, like I wasn’t pregnant anymore, even though I was due in two weeks,” Susan told me. “A good friend was going to have a baby shower for me that day, but I knew something wasn’t right.”

Susan delivered Andrea on September 29, 1989, stillborn. Andrea would have been twenty-five in 2014, the same age as my Megan.

“I still think about her every day,” her mom said.

Christmas hit the Armstrong family hard that year, just as it did us after Rick passed away. Then, thirteen days before the holiday, a poinsettia mysteriously appeared at their home.

Small gifts followed for twelve days, each with a card echoing “The Twelve Days of Christmas” song. Noah was nine years old that Christmas, and Zachary, five. Their reaction to the gifts was similar to Ben, Nick, and Megan’s.

“I’d be feeling low, and then a gift would come and it would take my mind off our loss for a while,” Susan said. “It was day three or four before we realized this was going to go on for some time.”

The joy the gifts brought to the family extended beyond the holidays. The next year, as a tribute to baby Andrea, Susan and George decided to play Secret Santa themselves following the tradition set by their true friends. Originally, the couple selected families who had lost infants as they had. They expanded their giving to include other losses because they saw the need. The tradition for Andrea continues.