Boxing Day

Friday the thirteenth, actually.  Which I have to keep reminding myself, since I never really know what day it is—and so stand to miss the fun parts.

Here is a short summation of my pitifulness: I cry over boxes.  Not actually cry, maybe.  At least not last night.  But get misty eyed and nostalgic and a little jealous.  The truth is: I am a box hoarder.  I am also a bow hoarder, as in ribbons and.  I could tell you that I’m like this because my parents were kids during the Great Depression (no – the other one, the one in the 20^th century, just before the war that came after the war to end all wars, which didn’t) and that they had passed on the waste-not want-not attitude to me.  Except I don’t think that’s it.

Or it actually could be it, at least partly.  Who knows what things you pick up without realizing?  My mom used to keep all the fat and oil from stuff she cooked; she’d pour it off into a huge coffee can (and where did that come from, now I wonder?  Oh.  Shortening.  She must have saved shortening cans, too – I’m beginning to see a pattern here).  I’m not sure what she did with the stuff once she’d filled the can (which always sat in the cabinet just below the sink).  When I was first married and used to make granola and chocolate cake from scratch out of whole wheat flour (honestly—this virtuous stage lasted a couple of years – imagine the joy at birthday parties), I did what seemed de rigor for young homemakers of eager and virtuous merit, and I saved the stuff, too.  But I did it with an eye to making my own soap.

I have since reformed. I now realize that it’s kind of stupid to make your own if it’s not really your funky thing when you can pay somebody else for doing it because it IS their funky thing.  But at the time, hand made lye and acid soap fit in with the granola and the colon-inspiring cakes.

Mom also saved balls of foil.  Well, they didn’t start out as balls, actually.  She’d make a ball out of foil she’d used for whatever reason (after washing it) and then, following the lead of the creator, added original horizontality to the project with each succeeding installment of foil.  So I did that, too.  For years.  Till I realized I really didn’t get why I was doing it and threw the giant ball away.

But none of this is the point.  And over none of this do I get the least bit sniffly. Unless, as I write about it, I start remembering my mom.

Give me a minute, here.

The boxes: there are never enough around the house when you are trying to wrap Christmas presents.  That is the bottom line.  The soup du jour.  The  essential problem here.

Christmas.  So as a young mother I started saving boxes.  My mom sent presents in boxes (now that I think of it, a good number of those were pretty soft on the corners – and sometimes had tags with other peoples’ names on them.  So maybe I did get this from her).  And G’s mom did.  And we got boxes when we bought stuff.  And I started saving them all to use at Christmas, then collecting them Christmas morning for the next year, packed like spoons, like three dimensional puzzle pieces into large MacIntosh computer boxes that were then taped closed and marked, “BOXES,” thus becoming the boxes boxes.

I have told you, I think, how I am the kind of person who, having had the Christmas Carol read to her aloud every year of her waking life, does not consider a house to be keeping Christmas as it should unless the pile of presents around/under/engulfing the tree is broad and tall enough to qualify as a seat for the ghost of Christmas Present.  Doesn’t matter that what’s inside the presents (a six pack of flower underwear, opened – each undie wrapped individually) as long as the paper reeks of color and the ribbon of shimmer and glint.

You can see, then, why a shortage of boxes gets to be a problem.

But here I am now, putting Gin’s fam’s gifts in a pile along with yards of fancy paper and plastic store sacks and tape and reams of bright tissue paper and heaps of nested boxes of all sizes—because Gin lives far away, and I have to wrap and ship the entire Seat to her a la post office.  Which means soon.  Before Thanksgiving.

And I put my hand out for a box, and as I touch it, do not so much remember as feel something.  This box has my mom’s handwriting on it.  This one came from one of the times we over spent at Natural Wonders on a trip to G’s fam in LA.  Here is a Rough Outback shoe box that’s a great shape, still in pretty crisp condition, size 4 (I meant to take a picture of it, but the wrapping machine wouldn’t slow down that long).  I don’t remember the shoes that came in this box.  But I find myself wondering which size 4 feet they once fit.  M’s?  Cam’s?  Maybe one of the girls.  People who I don’t have to hide things from anymore, because they are not sitting in this room with me.

Then I drop my hand in my lap, wondering if I can send this box, or that box, or that one – so far away.  It’s not that any one box reminds me of any one year, but that they all remind me of all years.  Of a way I used to live.  A way I loved – worn out and strained to the limit as I sometimes was.  Even sending to Gin  – who has little space in which to save old junk, and who, in any case, will be having to haul all her stuff back out west in about eight months – who will also remember these boxes and have perhaps even more poignant associations with them—sending means losing them.  That little whiff of Christmas past.  That little jolt of memory, no longer in my archive.  As though I send away a tiny, scruffy bit of myself.

So maybe that act of sending actually means more than whatever it is I’m gifting will ever mean.

How odd.

I don’t know if I’m the only one in the world who sits in the middle of mounds of old boxes and gets all mushy.  But there it is.  And I suppose it explains a little about how a mother, a family, begins to build rituals from the bottom up, leaving little cairns of love here and there so we can stumble on them later, unexpectedly.  Pain and joy.  Hard to tell the difference sometimes..