Tag: Christmas gift

Photo by Eugenia Romanova on Unsplash

A Doll for Christmas

1 December 2025 /

Nonfiction by Melanie Harless

As I search online for a Christmas doll for my five-year-old granddaughter, I am astounded at how things have changed since I was her age. There are so many choices. There are the baby dolls that don’t really do anything special and then there are the ones that, thanks to modern technology, seem almost alive. One giggles and plays peek-a-boo, another speaks two languages, and one even “eats” and “poops.” The most fantastic of all is a doll that engages in two-way communication, sees and hears, and expresses real emotions! Of course, I can always get one of those fashion-type dolls that look like miniature teenagers, but won’t that make her want to grow up too soon?

My mind drifts back to my first Christmas doll when I was about my granddaughter’s age. Santa Claus came to our house early on Christmas Eve while we were next door at my granny’s house for a Christmas Eve supper. When we got home, I could not believe all that Santa had brought me. There were lots of toys, but what caught my eye was the beautiful doll lying in a baby buggy. She was just what I had asked Santa to bring.

On Christmas night, I put my new doll down to sleep in her buggy and my family went back to Granny’s for Christmas dinner with all the relatives. Then chaos erupted. I never really knew for sure if the Christmas tree had caught fire or if something else caused our little house to go up in flames and burn to the ground taking my pretty doll with it.

I was upset about losing my new doll at first, but I guess I had not had it long enough to grow too attached. A few weeks late my mother made me a sock doll with blue button eyes, a red button nose, and a permanent red stitched smile on her face. It was not beautiful like my Christmas doll had been, but it was soft and huggable. I carried it everywhere and slept with it every night.

When I was six or seven, I received a Sweet Sue doll for Christmas with a complete layette that my mother had sat up late many nights sewing while the rest of the family slept. Sweet Sue, a 24-inch walking doll made of hard plastic, was the latest in doll technology at the time. She had beautiful blue eyes that opened and closed, long eyelashes, and curly auburn hair. As I held her hand, she walked beside me and turned her head from side to side.

I had never seen anything like her and played with her for many years, even after my brother knocked her head off a few months after Christmas. A metal post inside connected her head to her legs and after her head was knocked off she could no longer walk properly but the post kept her head on her neck in a cute tilt that looked as if she were looking up at me when she was sitting. It made it easier to dress her. I just lifted her head off!

For my ninth Christmas, my parents decided I should have a doll that wasn’t broken, and so I found under the tree a doll that took a bottle and wet. Along with it was a beautiful blue baby carriage. It was similar to the doll and carriage that had burned in the fire many years before. That same year, my new baby cousin was born right before Christmas and came to our house to stay while my aunt got her strength back. I had a real live baby to play with. I didn’t need dolls anymore.

I put the new doll and her carriage in my closet along with my broken Sweet Sue and the now raggedy sock doll. Occasionally, I took them out and played with them, trying to recapture feelings they had brought me, but only the beat-up old sock doll that my mother had made still made me smile.

After mulling over my doll history, I try again to choose a doll for my granddaughter. Would she be overwhelmed with a doll that can do almost everything or thrilled like I had been with that Sweet Sue walker? Would she rather have a baby doll with a carriage or a Barbie doll like so many little girls these days? Which doll would make her smile long after Christmas was over?

Then I knew the answer! I leave the online store and begin a new search—how to make a sock doll.

Melanie Harless began writing after retirement as a school librarian in 2006. She is an award-winning writer with poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and photography published in anthologies, journals, and magazines. She is a board member of Tennessee Mountain Writers and leads excursions for the Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning.

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

Bluebirds on Christmas Day

25 December 2024 /

Poetry by Wesley Sims

Early morning, a gloomy Christmas day,
with only mild expectations,
noisy birds gathering for breakfast outside.
I trudge to the kitchen for morning tea,
pull the blinds, put out some feed.
Within minutes three bluebirds arrive
and perch the porch rail near the patio door.
Their bold blue feathers seem to shine
like robes in the beam of brightening sky.
They seem not in a hurry to eat,
peer at me for a while as if
to ask a question. I ponder how three
is a perfect number so fitting this day.
They fly away but leave their gifts—
beauty and hope and a helping of cheer.

One soon returns to sit, and lingers.
Here for seconds or to tell me something?
If a bird could talk what would it say?
He tilts his head up toward the sky,
sits motionless for five full minutes.
Finally lowers his little blue head
and gazes at me through the glass.
Sits almost still for five minutes more.
I’ve fed the birds in winter for years
but never before witnessed such a scene.
I bow my head, and offer thanks.

Wesley Sims has published three chapbooks of poetry: When Night Comes, 2013; Taste of Change, 2019; and A Pocketful of Little Poems, 2020. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he has had poems nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.

Family Photo courtesy of Terri Watrous Berry

Jack and the Box

31 December 2023 /

Nonfiction by Terri Watrous Berry

It was the perfect size to hide a dog toy, plus it needed no wrapping since a brightly colored festive design ─ Santa in fact ─ was imprinted right on the cardboard. A loose-fitting detachable lid made it easy for him to nudge open with his nose, and since we used it year after year to hide his gift, Jack knew that box was his. We watched in awe once as he located it among other wrapped gifts, nudged it off the shelf where it was being kept with the rest until Christmas, flipped off the lid and trotted away with his new toy like a successful bandit.

The first Christmas after he passed, seeing his box again of course broke my heart anew, but I decided to make use of it one last time to hold a gift for my daughter Cathy’s cat, Misty. After stuffing two bags of cat treats inside, I inscribed the cat’s name across the lid in indelible red marker and placed it under the tree with the rest.

After all the gifts were opened Christmas day, Cathy began to scoop up the mountain of crumpled wrap, beleaguered bows, and boxes too abused to be of future use, stuffing it all into a big black garbage bag. When she picked up the box, she paused before calling, “Mom?” and then asked gently if I wanted to save it. I hesitated only a moment before telling her to dispose of it with the rest, thinking to myself of its heart-wrenching memories.

Apparently, however, Jack did not agree.

We live on several acres in a rural area, and our trash cans have to be hauled down the long driveway to the road the evening before the truck comes the following morning. The first pick-up day following that first Christmas without our beloved Springer, after donning coat, hat, boots, gloves and wrapping a scarf around my neck, I stepped out into the frigid air to retrieve our emptied cans. Jack used to accompany me on that chore.

I was keenly feeling his absence again on that drab grey Michigan morning, head down, listening to the snow crunch while watching my boots shuffle through even more that had fallen during the night. Rounding the bend as I approached the road, I looked up and saw the emptied cans lying in our yard as usual, their lids flung nearby, but something else caught my eye, something colorful standing smack dab in the middle of our driveway.

When I realized what it was I stopped abruptly, and then I laughed out loud. For Jack’s box had managed somehow to escape not only the garbage bag but also the grinding maw of the garbage truck that day ─ it was the only thing that did ─ and had landed undamaged in such a conspicuous spot that I could not have failed to notice.

Make of it what you will.

As for me, that empty little gift box was a gift, and it wasn’t empty at all. No, it was simply brimming with wise advice from a dear and faithful companion, telling me to remember the good times we had together not try to forget them, and that those we truly love are never really gone. Still chuckling as I bent to scoop it up, I continued to do so off and on all the way back up to the house.

Misty’s name that I had inscribed on the box with what claimed to be an indelible marker easily wiped right off, and now every year when decorations come down from the attic, Jack’s box is one of the ones I most look forward to seeing again. And it never fails to make me smile.

Terri Watrous Berry is a Michigan septuagenarian whose work has appeared over the past thirty-five years in anthologies, journals, magazines, and newspapers, with awards for prose from venues as diverse as The Hemingway Festival and the Des Plaines/ Park Ridge NOW Feminist Writer’s Competition.

Photo by Leohoho on Unsplash

The Gift

2 January 2023 /

Special Selection for the 2022/2023 Winter Holiday Issue

Nonfiction by Cindy Jones

The brunch dishes lingered on the dining table. Clothes half-out of overnight bags and pillows lined the walls. Someone had cleared away last night’s wine glasses from the coffee table. Aaron Neville quietly sang “Please Come Home for Christmas.” I nudged two friends from their private patio conversation that it was time to come in.

He sat crossed-legged on the floor next to the tree, wavy hair the color of sunlit wheat and strawberries, locks falling into his eyes, wearing a too-small Santa hat and the softest red shirt, not bright enough to be crimson, not brown enough to be burgundy, it was carmine I think. I loved him in that shirt. He made jokes, called out names and passed gifts across the room to our daughter and friends, our hearts filled with laughter and the warmth of belonging.

That might have been our 15th Christmas or our 25th, they are a jumble in my head.

My hands moved the yarn over with the hook, and under and then pulled up a loop. I worked quickly through the simple repetitive motions, counting stitches as I sat alone in the radiation waiting room or rested in bed for months at home. The evidence of my obsession was a pile of crocheted scarves and wraps that threatened to collapse when I tossed on the latest one.

My daughter laid the old camping blanket down and slid the Douglas fir across the back seat. Through my rearview, its tip leaned out the open window, bending in the wind. I dreaded dragging up the ornaments from the garage and recounting the stories that went with each one. Christmas had abandoned me in a new house in a new town. What remained were gamma rays cooking me from the inside, my daughter leaving for her father’s house and me wandering the deserted hallways of my past, tripping over the shattered dreams and broken trust.

I walked down my dark hallway, pulled a new skein of yarn randomly from my basket and got back in bed.

“I made it safely Mom,” she texted, “I’ll miss you for Christmas.”

I pulled the covers higher and reached for my hook and yarn. Long lengths of gray drifted from light shades to dark, morphing into sections of carmine, and pops of yellow, warm as Christmas lights. I began to work, quickly and mindlessly at first and then the movements became slower and slower, and more deliberate.

The sensation wafted stealthily through my bedroom window, open even in December, settling in the middle of my chest before I could stop it, blanketing me like a newly fallen snow over the rage and devastation that festered inside.

I stilled my hands from the over-under, closed my eyes to the colors, quieted my mind from the counting, inhaled the sweet belonging that lived in me, and tasted the unexpected gift of grace.

Dear Louis, Today I am filled with the spirit of Christmas. I thought of you when I saw these colors.  

After I wrapped the scarf in tissue paper and placed it in a small shipping box, I imagined his hand reaching in to lift it out, my note falling to the floor. I saw him raise his arms and slide it around his neck, brushing across his stubble to the small fine hairs on the back, as my lips used to do. 

Cindy Jones is currently living her best life in Mazatlán, Mexico while navigating Stage IV cancer. She spends her days walking on the beach, enjoying live music, writing creative nonfiction and photographing the external world in ways that reveal our inner landscapes.

brown gift box
Photo by Lucie Liz on Pexels.com

The Fourth Gift

11 December 2022 /

Special Selection for the 2022/2023 Winter Holiday Issue

Poetry by Brant Short

the magi brought three gifts to the child
but they forgot the most important one of all
as purveyors of wisdom they should have known this truth
a book is the most powerful object ever created by human hands
 
books are time machines
          that break the chain of present tense
books are maps
          directing us to wonderous places we never knew existed
books are medicines
          tonics, potions and salves with the power to heal a broken life
books are tools
          hammers, saws, and nails that help us build thoughts, words, and deeds
 
a book offers life changing wisdom but only if we accept the terms of the offer
     be open to all ideas
         share the good, reject the bad
              honor the human labor that crafted the book
                   never take the magic of a good book for granted

Brant Short was raised in rural Idaho and studied history and communication in college. He recently retired from Northern Arizona University after 26 years of teaching and has turned to creative expression. He has published poetry in several journals including Back Channels, The Limberlost Review, and Roanoke Review.

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