The Gifts of Christmas Past

 

Note the green rocking chair.   I still have it.

 

 

Here I sit on Christmas Eve reminiscing about gifts.   Not gifts I’m giving and not gifts I’m receiving.    I am looking at gifts that my mother gave me over the years.

Mom and Dad in Detroit

 

I was sitting in my parents living room in Anchorage in the late 1970s as I opened a gift from Mom.   After the wrapping was off, I lifted one end of the colorful gift box and saw three pieces of folded cloth.   Completely white, no design, nice and soft.

 

“Diapers,” said Mom.   “Yours when you were a baby.   They make good cleaning clothes.”

My baby diapers.

 

Sure enough, they were cotton WWII era diapers.   Did she really save them for 40 years so she could surprise me one Christmas Eve?    

 

Did she not use them on my six-year-younger brother?   I remember his diapers.   I remember holding onto a tiny hemmed corner and dipping the diaper in the toilet again and again until its contents finally washed off.   Then, they were stored under the bathroom sink in a white enamel pot with lid.

 

Whatever, I still have them—more than 40 years later.

 

 

Then, there are some things from my childhood that were simply returned to me, not as gifts for any special holiday, I think.     My stuffed black sheep that I remember so well, and a threadbare teddy bear that I don’t recall at all.

The doll has a sticker on the bottom of one foot that says Poland.   I assume it's dressed in the  tradition folk costume of that country.

 

I also have a round plaque on some kind of wood (beaverboard?) with a drawing of a kitten and two rabbits on it.   There is something up in the air above the kitten where some paint is flaked off but I can’t tell if it’s a butterfly or a bird.

Reverse side

 

This is a keepsake that I question because I have never had the kind of artistic ability of  whomever drew it.

 

There is a stretched and framed embroidered with the Lord’s Prayer on it that must have hung in my nursery room.    The earliest discovered version of  “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep,” is said to be from George Wheler in his 1698 book The Protestant Monastery.

 

A newer version, identical to what’s on my souvenir, was found in the New England Primer.

Crazy angle to keep the light from shining on the glass cover.

 

Another gift from Mom that I saved is a ceramic plate in a triangular shape.   The design on it is a childish drawing depicting two comically malformed children with “Bobbie and Bonnie, “ the names of my cousins, though why Bobbie appears to be wearing a skirt is beyond me.  

 

Also, “Jeannie 5 years.”

 

Yes, I knew my numbers and letters and colors at age five, despite no nursery school.   I guess Mom wrote the names and I copied them onto the drawing.

 

I recognized the drawing immediately     I am sure it was something I copied from one of the Childcraft books we had as kids.    But, her note that I did the drawing at five years of age puzzles me because we moved to Alaska when I was six .   Did those Childcraft books come up with us on the four-engine airplane?

 

The set of Childcraft books are on the cabinet behind my head.

  

Or were they shipped from Detroit to Anchorage?  It’s all a mystery now but I remember the drawing in those long-ago books.   A plagiarist at age five.

Detente with little brother.

 

I must have taken better care of my Polish doll than my sister.

My youngest sister.   Those green chairs?   I still have them.

Me and the green rocking chair that I still have.   I sure wish my hair looked like that today.