The Misfit Gift: An Oldie but a Goodie

Once upon a time, long, long, ago, I had adopted a crazy tradition from my mother of wrapping all of my Christmas gifts on Christmas Eve. I enjoyed this tradition as I and my poor,enslaved husband would sit in the living room for a couple of hours after the children had gone to sleep and diligently wrap all of our wonderful gifts which we had spent the past month carefully selecting for each child. Then we’d enjoy the delicious cookies and cocoa I had prepared for myself and the kids had left out for Santa. On this particular Christmas Eve, however; we ran into quite a bit of trouble. It really all started a couple of weeks before Christmas with the nightmares. Several days a week, I would wake up in the middle of the night in a horrible sweat and shake Bill to get his attention. “What?!?” he would shout in a panic, thinking something must be terribly wrong with one of the children. “I had the dream again. The one where we forgot Christmas!” I’d cry. His response was always the same. “Go back to sleep, you didn’t forget Christmas.” But the dream was so real. It was Christmas Eve and I had forgotten all about it. It was late, very late, and all of the stores were closed. The children were asleep and we didn’t even have a tree. In a panic, I would run around town, looking for a leftover tree in a darkened tree sale lot. I would always end up finding a scrawny little thing that only Charlie Brown could enjoy. But hey, we needed a tree and this is all that was left. Next I would search all over town for a store that was open. Dracut being a relatively small town; we don’t even have stores, at least not the kind you’d find Christmas presents in. So I would go to Lowell. The only stores in Lowell that were open this late were in the scary sections. Normally I would never travel there after dark, but hey, this is for my kids. I can’t let them think that Santa let them down. So off I’d go to Walgreens in Scaryville, Lowell to purchase the most random and awful gifts I could find, because random and awful is all I could ever find in my dream. So anyway, back to reality. I would sit up in my bed and take a few deep breaths and a sip of water and then lay down and try to fall back to sleep. Finally, it was Christmas Eve, and like I mentioned before, there we were, wrapping our carefully chosen gifts for each of our seven children. Now as I’m sure you’ve heard, or perhaps you’ve even experienced yourself, when there are a lot of children in the house, someone can tend to get forgotten. Well, Christmas time is no different. After wrapping all of the presents, I separated everything into piles so that they could be placed strategically around our very beautiful, very big (because if you remember, we did NOT forget Christmas was coming) tree. I looked proudly at my piles and I counted: Kailah, 7 gifts, Billy 7 gifts, Matthew and Mark 7 gifts each, Daniel 7 gifts, and Amelia 7 gifts. Mission accomplished. Every pile was exactly equal. However, if you know our family, you know that Amelia does not come after Daniel, Christopher does. Christopher! Oh my goodness, I forgot Christopher! It was after midnight, what was I going to do? I searched through the piles to see if I could steal some gifts for Topher from his unknowing siblings. Most of them were either too old for him, or too young, or too girly. I found a couple from Daniel and the twins’ piles and now my piles, my beautiful equal piles (because life is supposed to be equal, isn’t it?) were wrecked. The new count looked something like this: Kailah still 7, Billy still 7, Matthew and Mark 6 gifts each (which no longer coincided in true twin fashion, another pet peeve of mine) Dan 5 gifts, Amelia still 7 gifts, and Topher, poor Topher 4 gifts, purchased for others and stolen for him. This was a good start, but I had to do something. Topher couldn’t get just four gifts, so what was I supposed to do? By now we were pushing 1am on Christmas morning and every store is closed! What was I going to do? Christmas would be ruined by the imbalance of gifts. Poor Topher would be crushed! So, I did what any deranged, psychopathic mother would do in this situation. I called my sister-in-law, Sue, who also happens to be a shop-aholic! I was certain she must have an extra gift lying around her house that I could pass off as intentionally purchased for poor Christopher. And sure enough, not only was she still awake because she’s as nuts as me, she had a gift I could have for Topher. She had purchased it the previous year for Toys For Tots and never got around to delivering it. I didn’t care what it was or who was supposed to receive it. I knew it had been left in the back of her closet, a forgotten Christmas toy like the Charlie in the Box from the land of misfit toys for a reason. This little toy, no matter how terrible a gift it might be was going to save Christmas! Sue, being the kind, sweet woman that she is, rushed it right over to our house. I took one look at the box and knew, this was nothing I ever would have purchased. It was a box of accordion style tubes that connected to little ball-shaped heads and silly hands and feet to make little people. What a dumb toy, I thought, but hey, I was desperate so I wrapped that baby up and stuck a tag on it. To Topher Love Daddy. Hey, I wasn’t going to take credit, or should I say blame for such a ridiculous gift! I know the kids never really looked at the From part of the tag, but I still wasn’t putting my name on it. Under the tree it went, and off to bed we went for three and a half short hours. At 5am our bed was full of jumping, screaming children. Sluggishly we got up from our bed and led the birth-order train down the stairs to the living room. All the children sat in their traditional circle around the tree and we started handing out the presents. One by one, each gift was unwrapped and adored by the children. Then the time came when Daddy handed the crappy, fill-in gift to Topher. He tore the wrapping off like any other gift, not realizing what I knew, that this was a second-hand, forgotten toy from the back of Aunt Sue’s closet! He didn’t care. It was Christmas and this beautiful box had his name on it. When he looked at the gift and showed it to all of his siblings I heard the same ooos and awwws that came with every gift. “Such polite kids” I thought to myself, secretly laughing at how naïve they all were. Finally the presents were all open and Bill and I went into the kitchen to start heating the banana bread and making the coffee. I went back into the living room when I heard some bickering and I found the most unbelievable scene. They were fighting, actually fighting, over that ridiculous toy! It was everyone’s favorite present and all of the kids had put aside their gifts to play with it. How could this be possible? All of my careful planning and all that money I had spent and everyone was fighting over that foolish thing? This was such an injustice. But hey, I laughed at the silliness of the whole situation and returned to helping Bill with Christmas breakfast. Afterall, they didn’t know any better, they’re just kids!