Gift of the magi

Every family has its Christmas stories. In my humble opinion, gentle readers, the best Christmas stories involve self-sacrifice, giving up something of your own so that someone you love can have something they want or need.
In American literature, the classic example is O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi in which an impoverished young married couple each give up something very dear to themselves in order to give a gift to the other. The twist, of course, is that each one’s sacrifice makes the other’s gift pointless from a practical point of view. The wife sells her long, beautiful hair to a wig maker to buy a chain for her husband’s pocket watch. The husband sells his watch to buy ornate combs for his wife’s hair. The poignancy of the story lies in the sacrifice and the consideration the two showed for each other, not in the usefulness of the gifts.
When I was a small child, living with my family in Memphis, there were five of us kids, three sons and 2 daughters, and my parents stuffed into a 3-bedroom house. I was the youngest of the litter and the next youngest was my sister Leslie, who was, and still is now I come to think of it, nine years my senior. My father worked for the public utility in Memphis so we weren’t wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, nor were we poor in any meaningful sense. There were times when things were pretty lean, though, since it seemed that my folks always had at least two of their kids in college at the same time and Christmas presents tended to be on the practical side.. Winter clothes and such things.
Being the baby, I know I was spoiled by my family. Still, around Christmas time, it always seemed that what I wanted Santa Claus to bring me was just beyond our financial means to achieve. Along with my siblings, I had come to accept this and after a certain age, never bothered to ask for anything extravagant.
One of our little Christmas treats every year was to go downtown to the big Goldsmith’s Department Store and go through the Christmas village display. It had a variety of early animatronic elves and reindeer twisting mechanically on or flying over fake snow amid plywood gingerbread houses. Not exactly Disneyworld, but it didn’t cost anything to see it and for the mid-1950s it was pretty cool. At the end of the tour, little kids, including yours truly, could sit on Santa’s lap and tell him what we wanted for Christmas. The Christmas village was strategically located on the far side of the toy department from the entrance. so you couldn’t get to see Santa or his mechanical reindeer without going through the toy department. I always thought that was some pretty good marketing on somebody’s part.
Anyway, one year as my mother rushed me through the toys to get to the free Christmas village, I noticed the most wonderful thing I had ever seen in my entire life, all five years of it. It was a set of chrome plated cap pistols in genuine leather holsters. Even at five years of age, however, I could tell that the $25 price tag put those wonderful cap pistols well beyond my reach. To make matters worse, they put those pistols in the store window so that every time we went past the store on the bus, those pistols would glare out at me, plainly saying, “Aren’t we glorious? Aren’t we just the most splendid things you’ve ever seen? You can’t have us, but we sure look neat, don’t we?”
They were all I dreamed of, all I could talk about. My father ended up telling me to shut up about them because they were way too expensive. It wasn’t until my own sons started wanting things like sports cars and 16-year-old female Swedish exchange students for Christmas that I came to fully understand my father’s frustration.
I knew I couldn’t have those cap pistols but that didn’t keep me from wanting them. When Christmas Morning rolled around, I was possibly the most astounded little boy in the civilized world when those cap pistols were under our Christmas tree. My two brothers had saved their money from the paper routes and bought them for me.
As it turned out, the made-by Mattel cap pistols were made of shoddy cast metal that cracked and scorched when you shot caps off in them. What had mattered to me was that my brothers had gone out of their way to get them for me.
My eldest brother, Ronnie, passed away some years ago, and my “middle” brother, Carl, lives in deepest, darkest Texas. We haven’t seen one another in years. Golly, I miss those guys.