Did You Break Even?

I’m sorry, in my family we can be a little bit irreverent. We often had Christmas morning as individual nuclear family units and then gathered at one place for the overwhelming family dinner.

And as family members greeted each other the question, “Did you break even?” was often asked of what you’d given and what you’d received.

It was, of course, rhetorical, and meant to be humorous, all in good fun. It was always responded to by laughter, sometimes it was answered but only if it was funny to do so. No one meant any harm, it was Christmas after all and we are a loving family.

For me, it is hard for anyone to buy or make anything that beats my best gift. I get to write. And that is a gift I received from my grandma when I was five or so. She taught me how to read and write. And though I remember it as a whisper, like it was the most amazing secret ever shared, the best part of that gift was just a casual statement that my mind has coloured I’m sure to be a conspiratorial susurration, “You can write anything you can think, anything you want to write. You can do that.”

This year …

For Christmas this year, I’m at home. My parents and grandparents are long gone. My brothers are spread out and though we talked of getting together for celebrating, it didn’t seem feasible and it didn’t make sense for safety reasons. We have a new baby in our house and we felt it made more sense to keep him to ourselves than to expose him to the frightful things that won’t stop cropping up lately that an infant with no immunity is easily susceptible to.

And as if to reassure us that we’d made the right decision, Mother Nature closed the roads and filled in our driveway and put paid to any idea of changing our minds on travels and visits.

Fine!

Fine? Yes, it is.

And now I’m sitting at home on a Christmas morning, watching my new son eat and drift off into a milk induced coma of lazy sleep. I’ve been given the gift of an opportunity to contemplate all my sixty plus Christmases and to consider the gifts that have stood out for me.

I always thought that being told I could write if I chose to was the one gift that would be my all time favourite, for ever. But it has been surpassed.

You think you know by what?

You’re thinking a first child would be the greatest gift and that’s what has exceeded the gift my grandma gave me, right? And yes, you’re partly right.

But the truth is that the greatest gift I’ve been given is that now, or rather sometime in the future, I will get to pass on my grandmother’s gift to my son.

“Boy, you can write anything you can think, anything you want to write. You can do that.”

So, back to the question …

Did I break even?

No.

The gifts I have received this year have far exceeded what I have given. I got to be a father, at Christmas, at home, with my son, who gets to do anything he wants with his life … and I get to tell him some day that I hope he writes about it.