Due to an tragic accident in middle school, my sister - let's call her "Pixie" - was never able to bear a child. I want to tell about the worst Christmas we spent together and the one that I will always cherish the most. And both were centered around Pixie.
Christmas 1984. My husband had passed away in August, leaving me with four small children, a new job, a new house, and all alone. I just didn't want to do it. It was the darkest time of my life thus far. Adding insult to injury, my baby sister soon after that, that her five year marriage was over.
"He's been sleeping with someone else - I haven't been with him for months, not since I found out, I just can't. And now he wants out because she's pregnant." Double ouch.
Not for the first time, I wondered to myself, what was worse? Divorce or death? At least as a widow, I had closure. She still saw him nearly everywhere she went.
So Pixie and I spent that bleak Christmas Eve wrapping Santa gifts and weeping on each other's shoulders, for broken hearts and broken dreams and hope blown away like ashes. I was so glad to have her there the next morning. I would have been a basket case without her.
Three years later, after careful deliberation, I had quit my job to be Mama. I figured if I budgeted carefully I could just about do it. And I could, and did, but it left little room for things like, oh, I don't know, CHRISTMAS PRESENTS. I had managed to scrape together about $100 for Santa, which, while it's better than a lot of people had - and have - felt pitifully thin for four kids. I was all ready to make the best of it - who needs dozens of more toys anyway? - when my golden-hearted sister came to me with an idea.
"I want to be Santa this year," Pixie said. "It's not much, but I have $300 I've been saving for a rainy day and I think it's storming right about now."
I didn't want to let her, it felt selfish and greedy. Then she said, "I'll never be able to play Santa for any of my own," and my heart broke for her. Suddenly, letting her be Santa seemed exactly right.
We planned a big shopping blowout weekend, just the two of us, and managed to make that $300 (Guilty, I used the original $100 on non-Santa stuff) go a LONG long way. We had SO MUCH FUN visiting toy stores, craft stores, kids' clothing stores (the older two girls were 7 and 9, so clothes were really becoming important to them), then hours wrapping everything. In the "true" spirit of Santa, she kept everything hidden in her apartment until the appointed hour.
This particular Christmas Eve was very different. We giggled like school girls over our selections, sang as we stuffed stockings, stayed up way too late reminiscing over childhood Christmases past. I remember wanting those moments with her to last forever.
And the next morning, Christmas morning, my Pixie sister experienced the joy of being Santa first hand.
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