There are six simple words that can leave me speechless.
“What do you want for Christmas?”
I am honestly baffled, floundering like Ralphie in “A Christmas Story” when he sits on Santa’s lap and blanks on his beloved Red Ryder BB gun. A football? OK, a football, sure.
My friends can tell you in great detail. Not just a purse but this brand and this color. Not just a new phone but a particular style and specific features. This ring, this sweater, this gift card to this store in this amount.
This probably is why an orchestrated Black Friday shopping excursion can leave me cold. It doesn’t seem like gift-giving. It is more like fulfilling orders like a warehouse employee pulling items to ship to a customer.
What do I want for Christmas? It’s something that might come tied with a bow but is nonetheless hard to package. I want to be surprised.
When I was a child, we alternated the holiday between our house in Washington County and my grandma’s farm in Minnesota. It never occurred to me as a second grader that driving halfway across the country had a cost.
So I didn’t realize when my cousins and I rushed into the living room to see what Santa had brought us that the slender doll in the red dress was anything other than the best present ever.
She was delicate and beautiful. She had long, brown hair just like mine, braided and pinned up in loops on the sides of her head. A sweet smile touched her face and quiet blue eyes peered up at me. I loved her immediately. I named her Louisa.
It was years before I knew that my mother stitched Louisa herself out of cloth and yarn and painted on that pretty face. She did it so we could afford to see my grandma and still get presents.
Did I see Louisa in the Sears Wish Book that kids in the 1980s regarded like a holy text? Of course not. I didn’t ask Santa to bring her to me. I didn’t know she was exactly what I wanted until I saw her under the tree.
This Christmas could be a hard one for fulfilling wish lists. Between people being out of work and supply chain problems, that one perfect present may be out of reach. But maybe little kids and grown-ups alike could learn the unexpected magic of not having a wish come true because of presents that were never requested.
When I open a gift, I don’t want to know what is inside. I want to pull off that wrapping paper and find out that the person who gave it to me thought about me enough to believe this was just the right something. That is what it means when we say it’s the thought that counts — because it’s the only thing that really does.
What do I want for Christmas? I have no idea. And that is exactly how I like it.
