Large Fierce Mammal

Source: Huffington Post

For me, being 3 years old, I remember receiving the one thing I truly wanted. And I remember my favorite chocolate cake in the middle of a table covered with a poinsettia tablecloth. And I remember my handsome father finally being home with us.

I think of this brown pony Christmas, and it was perfect. I didn’t notice how many presents were under the tree; I don’t remember cranky parents or long lines or fights at stores for gifts. I remember magic — with a twinkling tree, and an enormous gift for my brother and me under that tree. Riding that pony together was more fun than riding it alone could ever be: I had my partner for our adventures.

I remember it as the brightest, shiniest Christmas a little girl could imagine.

Those words conclude an article by Alexandra Rosas titled The Gift of Not Getting Everything for Christmas, published exactly a week ago by the Huffington Post Parents page. It was Mrs. LFM who found it and brought it to my attention, and while we certainly don’t buy into everything that appears there, we both consider this particular item to be a gem.

As part of her preparations for writing this article, Ms. Rosas tells of some email correspondence about this singularly wonderful childhood Christmas memory with her older sister who had retained a startlingly opposite memory of the experience.

These are the bright and beautiful memories I have of a Christmas Eve when I was barely 3 years old. It was the first year my father was in this country. While I was preparing for this post, I emailed my older sister to see if she had any details to add. My sister is eight years older, and she would have been 12 years old that Christmas.

Typing with excitement over the memory I hoped to share, I asked her, “Do you remember that Christmas that Pachito and I got that rocking pony we wanted so much?”

“Oh. That awful Christmas.” Her response stunned me. “Yes, yes, I do. You two had to share a present. It was Daddy’s first year in America, it was awful… we had nothing.”

I sat at the other end of the email, the wind knocked out of me.

“Are we talking about the same Christmas?” I typed back. “It was wonderful. Daddy was here, we had the pony, we had the chocolate cake with pink frosting at midnight…”

“No. Don’t you remember how cold we were? Your pajamas were too small. We all had to share gifts. No one else got presents except the kids.”

“But we were so happy,” I insisted. “Daddy was dressed up in a suit and tie, and mama had on her flowered dress, and ‘buelita was cooking.”

“Daddy always wore a suit and a tie.” My sister’s email became an explanation. “Mama was pregnant and had on her only good maternity dress. And our grandmother was always at the stove.”

And so it goes, Goode Reader, that for one, the glass is half empty while for another it’s half full, while for yet another, that glass is just too god damned big.

Hold on to your memories. They become our story, for good or for ill.