The Mother’s Christmas Story

by Apollo M. Arenas
Dear Readers,
I’m yielding my space to this simple but profound story. Maligayang Pasko po!
* * *
The Mother sat by herself before the fireplace as she waited for her family to come down for mass on Christmas eve. To the side of their fireplace was their Christmas tree. It was an artificial tree which had been in and out of the same box for the past ten years. “Old, but it still looks good,” she told herself.
The color had started to fade but with the lights on, one could hardly notice. And the children had been used to it by now and knew exactly where to hang the same old ornaments. They had not added any new ones in a couple of years but she thought there were enough. The angel that sat on top had become a part of the family. The children had given her a name, Dusty.
There were no presents underneath the tree. By the fireplace hung three tiny Christmas stockings, too small to carry any gift of any kind. The kids had been doing that for years but none of them ever included a letter for Santa. “Maybe the kids know the Santa secret,” she thought to herself.
But from out of the corner of one stocking, a slip of paper peeked timidly. The Mother was sure she had never seen one until tonight. A jolt of guilt ran through her body because she never paid attention to those socks before. She thought her children always felt like she did about Christmas.
With equal guilt and sly, she pulled out the slip of paper. It was a letter to Santa from Middle Daughter. As the Mother read it, all the Christmases when she was her children’s age came back to her. Each word Middle Daughter wrote plucked a chord in her heart and made her body tremble. By the time she was done reading, her husband had laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. Then a solitary tear rolled down her eye.
As a child, Christmas was one holiday the Mother anticipated more eagerly than the others. On this day, she knew there would be separate presents from each parent, not the single gift that they jointly gave her on her birthday. Even her brother whom she fought with all the days of the year would indulge her with a Christmas present. Best of all, she had control on what presents she was going to get. Make believe or not, Santa was a convenient ally for presents wished for. She covered all bases by writing a letter to Santa.
Their home, huge for a family of four, always glowed with the Christmas colors of red, green, and yellow almost as soon as Thanksgiving day was over. It looked like a huge package that held treasures of gifts she would tirelessly unwrap under their pine-scented Christmas tree, equally bright and loaded with old trinkets and refilled with new ones over the years.
Before her twelfth Christmas and seven days before school took a break for the holidays she had sensed that Christmas would be different. Her father was always at home, never left for work the same time that her school bus picked her up and still there when she was dropped off.  Her mother had not been out shopping either, not for decorations, not for the Christmas meal, not for presents.  
After dinner that night, she asked, “Shall we go look for and chop down our Christmas tree tonight?”
Her father, without looking up answered, “I almost forgot. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get one while you’re in school. You don’t have to come. I’ll get one from the corner.”
“But that won’t be as tall as the one we got last year,” she protested. Her father did not respond. She turned to her mother who was drying up the dishes. She sighed but didn’t say a word.
“This Christmas doesn’t look very promising,” she grumbled to herself. Every day that she came back from school she was always in a rush to see if the old Christmas spirit had come back to their house but she ended up disappointed each time.
After the midnight mass on Christmas eve, she wished she could just go straight to bed. Their dining table did not look like it did before. There was very little food, only a few cookies, a small piece of ham her mother bought at the corner store and eggnog which tasted strangely flat. The little food they had was barely touched. Her parents looked sad. She and her brother and sister felt mad and made sure it showed. This made their parents look even sadder.
They kissed the children then told them to go to bed. They forgot to greet each other a merry Christmas because they all felt it was not quite so. She could not stop crying so she went up to their attic to wait for Santa whom she suddenly believed in. He was her only hope for Christmas salvation.
“Maybe he will drop by and give me what I want,” she wished. She sat and waited in the dark looking up and scanning the sky for him. “Maybe he can’t see me in the dark,” she whispered to herself as she felt increasingly impatient for his arrival.
She groped for, found and turned on a tiny light in the attic. In its soft glow, she saw boxes strewn all over that damp place. Her heart leaped when she saw some boxes marked presents thinking that their parents had surprises for them on Christmas morning. They were presents, indeed, but they were presents from past Christmases.
Her smile quickly faded into a smirk. She saw the crying doll she got when she was four, the tea set when she was five, Barbies dressed up for different occasions. There were many more presents. Most of them looked new because they were still in their original plastic wrappers.
As dawn approached, she realized that Santa overlooked a few kids like her because he was getting old. She thought, “I can help Santa! I’ll ask Mom to rewrap these and Dad will haul them all in our car to bring to the Christmas party this afternoon. My friends and I can pretend to be Santa’s little elves bringing the presents he forgot to drop off this Christmas eve!”
She was all excited and forgot her resolve not to speak to her parents ever again.
By noon, the presents were all loaded in the van and they were set for the Christmas party. As they unloaded their trunk, she saw all the other families also unloading huge bags of presents as if each car was Santa’s sleigh with presents for all the kids in the world. Everybody was beaming with delight for what they thought would be a surprise. Well, it was indeed a surprise for everyone because all her friends had the same plan!
“Did we all look up the sky and waited for Santa?” she asked herself. And was it a coincidence that they all stumbled on old presents unused and neglected in some dark corner of their houses? Who made them think of gathering up old presents and giving it to others who may derive new pleasures from them? Ah, it must be Santa, that clever old man, she quietly mused.
As she got older, it became clearer to her what Christmas should be and how it was always going to be with her and her family.
The Mother heard footsteps rushing down the stairwell. She slipped the letter back into Middle Daughter’s sock. It said:
Dear Santa,
This is the first time I have written to you and I am sorry. Not because I have been a bad girl but because you may have come to the house before and found no letter from me. This time, I thought I should write you a note to wish you a Merry Christmas. You probably don’t know what to give me because I did not ask for one. Whatever you think I should get, would you please give it to the girl that lives near the grocery? You know her because she wears the same dress and is very thin. Her parents look like that, too. They don’t have a fireplace but you can still go through the door. Don’t worry about me. I have Mom and Dad and Sam and Anne. Thank you and Merry Christmas.
Sarah (I am the middle child).