It was December of 1969. Mitch Miller’s Christmas tunes were blaring from the record player in the living room, but Mom didn’t hear a sound. The holidays were here and she was someplace else. It’s the place most mothers head unwillingly during the harried holiday season—the land of preoccupation.
When she wasn’t shopping she was memorizing page numbers of the Sears Catalog and dialing for deliveries. When she wasn’t writing Christmas cards she was writing holiday reminders in shorthand so we couldn’t decode her next move. When she wasn’t talking to someone else about someone’s gift she was talking to herself and then answering back.
It was the only time of the year my brother and sisters resorted to speaking Pig Latin to one another, because it allowed us to speak freely about her without ramifications. Sometimes it felt like we were all living in a foreign country and it wasn’t the North Pole.
Back then, I was still young enough to believe and old enough to ask the question: How could this mother of five be so busy when Santa and his elves do all the work? Sure, we had a big family and a larger extended family, but Mom wasn’t shopping for everybody, or was she?
Many cousins and friends had already thrown in the Christmas towel, believing the Santa “thing” was just a holiday hoax and that the truth could be found in a parent conversation overheard or in a bag stuffed full of presents in the attic. While many kids were ready to accept this truth, I was searching for a reason to keep believing, so I tested the skeptic’s theories.
For nights on end I kept my ears open. I snuck out of bed and sat at the top of our dark staircase listening to my parents talk about everything and anything Christmas, but nothing supported the hoax theory. They talked about relatives, neighbors and friends and about who would deliver what presents to whom and when. It all seemed so complicated.
I also searched every inch of our Cape home with Columbo-like compulsion for gifting evidence and justification for my mother’s holiday behavior. Again, I found nothing but more gifts for relatives and friends and more reasons to understand why my mother was deaf to Mitch Miller’s sing-a-longs.
Just as I was about to happily embrace Santa again, I found something in the garage. It was in a plastic bag stuffed behind the wheelbarrow. Inside was a coveted turquoise Easy Bake (toy) Oven. I knew it had to be for one of us, my younger sister to be exact. It was third on her Christmas list. I also knew that this gift could deliver the truth. If it showed up under the tree on Christmas morning wearing a red Santa tag then I’d know just what my mother had been up to.
Christmas came. No Easy Bake Oven. Either I was bad at detective work or Mom was that good at her Christmas work. Whatever the case, the absence of that gift was in fact a priceless gift of hope. There really was a Santa Claus and he wasn’t my mother!
I often wondered what happened to that Easy Bake Oven, but never did I ask. It did eventually sit under the tree on a Christmas that followed, but not that Christmas. As the years passed, my mother continued to pass my Santa tests, helping me discover the real gift of Christmas, her. Her commitment to making Christmas special meant that she had to forfeit her own merriment for the sake of our own memories and happiness. Magically, she kept our hopes alive by working day and night to choreograph a Christmas extravaganza that would never disappoint. And it never did.
KAREN KIEFER is the Director of the Church in the 21st Century Center at Boston College and the mother of four daughters