Lesser Expectations

I remember one Chirstmas Eve as a child when I awoke after a few hours of sleep, the exctiement of the impending day burning bright.  It seemed to me it must be very late but it was probably no more than 11, my approximate age.  The lights in the living room were still on, my father probably struggling with the difficulties of assembling some gift or other.

My mother always left the door to my room slightly ajar.  She had an aversion to fully closed doors and could not stand the though of a locked one within the house.  Doors to the outside world were always locked even during the day but doors to rooms within the house could never be.

I could just manage to see a narrow view to the living room.  My room was at the end of our one floor house and the other end of the hallway emptied into the living room where our Christmas tree sparkled above the difts.  The slender view I could manage by leaning way out of bed seemed to hold some magical device with tubes running in a variety of geometric patterns.  The dominant color seemed to be red but what wonder was this. My imagination leaped.  In my mind cars raced along the intersecting angles and rose to great heights through various dimensions.  Like one of those train sets where multiple engines race through tunnels and levles and almost certainly will collide but never do.

What could it be?  Did I really want to know or would the most magical moment of Christmas morning be spoiled.

Chirstmas in my childhood was this mixture of peace and wonder that I tried to cling to for as long as possible -- usually only a few days until normal, mundane, ordinary life resumed.  Still, a few days are longer for a child than an adult.  For those few days, my father didn't go to work.  There was no school, no appoitments with doctors and, most of all, no contact with the outside world and the difficulties and awkwardness it presented.  Our small family was self contained and I was comfortable and content within it in a way I almost never was with the rest of the world.  I could play with my toys, read, watch my favorite TV shows and not be bothered.  Simply that, not be bothered.

As I drifted back to sleep that night I held tight to the promise of the most amazing Chrismas gift ever and its revelation in the morning.

As it turned out, my mother had to wake me with a gentle "It's Christmas."  My father was already up and sitting in his robe with his coffee, anxious to begin. He would announce before opening each of his gifts what it was and annoyingly to me and my mother was almost always right.  On the other hand, he would cleverly package gifts to my mother and me in ways that would defy identification.

That most marvelous of gifts, the many angled mystery of Chirsmas Even, turned out to be a bicycle which, while wonderful enough in itself, lacked the mystery and majesty of my imagination.  Anything would have.

While I didn't let on, that whole Christmas morning was somehow diminished.  I searched in vain for a greater spark of wonder that I could not find.  There were many gifts and I knew that my hidden attitude was self centered and selfish. As I said, I didn't let on.  In my small family we were always very careful about one another's feelings.  You could think bad things but it was "bad form" to verbalize them.

But in my heart I was disappointed.  Imagination had taken me to unattainable heights and so I tumbled if not into despair at least downward to a kind of bittersweet melancholy.  Christmas was still Christmas but a gap between imagination and reality, a chasm, had opened never to be fully joined again. Something was lost.