Don't forget Baby Jesus!

A few months ago Michele and I moved to a hip urban condo that's less than half the size of our old house. Every possession had to be carefully reconsidered. When all the boxes were finally packed, Christmas decorations that used to take me two hours just to get down from the attic had been consolidated to a handful of items.

But there was never any question about the presepio Michele's father made for the family when Fabio and Arianna were very young. He hammered natural sticks together to represent the stable and hand painted china figures of Mary and Joseph, a couple of shepherds, the cow and the donkey that watch patiently over the empty crib of tin foil every year. It is Arianna's job as the youngest child to place the little plastic baby on Christmas eve. When we put the presepio out this time, our new apartment really felt like home.

Unfortunately it turned out that we had to be more flexible than we would like with our traditions. My father-in-law is very, very sick and I dropped Michele at the airport on Tuesday so he could be in Naples for a time of year that is always special to Italian families, but this year even more so. Before my husband left he put the baby in the manger early, afraid that an Americana on her own would forget and mess things up.

Tomorrow Fabio and Arianna and I will host the Christmas dinner for the members of our family who live on this side of the Atlantic. My 28 year-old-daughter is opening presents with her best friend from the naval base in Sicily. But we will all be thinking of the ones we love in Naples and good times we've shared in years past.

This is a video from our trip last year at Christmas time. The presepio in Caltagirone, a charming hill town in the middle of Sicily known for its ceramics, is probably the most elaborate in the entire country.

The Best Present Michele Never Gave Me

During the holiday season a lot of conversations with my female friends center on the burden of shopping for gifts.  Our obligations  have spread with American affluence and the ready availability of personal credit.  Now we are expected to exchange remembrances with professional colleagues, fellow book club members, the mailman, the hair dresser, and our neighbors.  Tonight Michele and I are invited to a dinner with casual acquaintances we haven't seen for over a year and the focal point of the evening is the ubiquitous White Elephant event where everybody re-gifts gifts they didn't like the first time around, as if once wasn't bad enough.  Ho-ho-ho.

I was part of that mentality once, the one that implies that caring is measured by yards of ribbon and wrapping paper.  But that was before February 14, 2002.


It was our second St. Valentine's Day as a couple. I tracked down a baby-sitter for the kids and made reservations for the Cincinnati Zoo's annual event on animal mating rituals, which I thought would interest my science-oriented husband.  That day I bought heart-shaped cupcake pans, and spent the afternoon personalizing each little cake in confectioner's sugar.  Then I constructed a lovely display with Valentine cards and small wrapped gifts to show my new family how much I loved them and that there was no limit to what I was willing to do to show it.

Michele walked in the door a few minutes after I finished, took one look, and said, "Oh, I didn't know we were celebrating."

Anger is not an emotion that is encouraged in Midwestern America.  So it took a while for me to register exactly how furious I was.  But I figured it out somewhere between the nocturnal house and the hot fudge sundaes.  I had gone to a lot of trouble.  I'd done the wash and cooked the dinners and attended too many g-rated movies to count.  And Michele hadn't even bought me a card.

He tried to take me out to dinner to make it up to me.  But my meal tasted like sand.  I walked home in the rain by myself, Michele driving slowly along the curb until he finally gave up and went ahead to relieve our baby-sitter.

The next morning I woke up.  I realized I had a choice.  I could either badger Michele into doing holidays the way we'd always done them in my family with twenty packages on the mantel for every celebration, so many of them they were almost always forgotten in relatively short-order.  Or I could convert to the way Michele was brought up, where presents were not demands but intensely special exchanges to be treasured on the rare and unexpected occasions they occurred.  When I thought about how much time and energy I'd invested in the gift of giving over the years, the weight of which always seems to tip more heavily on the responsibilities of women, I realized it was a contest I would never, ever win.

Now Michele and I go out to dinner to celebrate.  Sometimes we get each other cards.  Sometimes we don't.  This year we've bought a new house and I got to furnish it the way I want, so there's not one more thing I want for Christmas.  Really.  But I got Michele a few items he'd never buy for himself.  To all my neighbors, friends, and the lady who cuts my hair, I promise not to get you anything if you do the same for me.  Time together, freely given, is enough, don't you think?

Some day, if we're lucky, maybe one of us will get a present like the one Michele got from his mother when he was a teenager and there wasn't a lot of money for extras.  He wanted a transistor radio to listen to the Top 40 program, and the family didn't have one.  When she finally gave it to him six months after he mentioned it, it wasn't wrapped.  They were sitting on the edge of her bed and she handed him the small orange appliance, an event so special he remembers it like it was yesterday, the tone of his voice almost reverential as he describes it.

Real presents aren't duties or party tricks.  They come from one heart to another without expectation.



Buon Natale a Tutti.