A gift of color
A large round tin that I keep my sewing thread in slipped to the floor with a clatter, scattering the contents in many directions. As I gathered the spools of thread from near and far to place them back in the tin, a price label on a wooden spool of bright orange thread caught my eye.
"Nineteen cents!" I exclaimed. "That one has been around years, it should be in a museum."
My instant recall button flipped back to our first Christmas in eastern Montana. The six-foot mound of snow, a fixture during the winter, had been shoveled off the front porch. My husband and our four children had worked most of the day decorating the porch with evergreens and I had dressed a number of small dolls in choirboy robes, which were secured with wire on a bench in front of a stained glass window made of cellophane. The window and evergreens concealed a phonograph that played a Bing Crosby record. The strains of "Silent Night" and "God Bless Ye Marry Gentlemen" filtered through the house and out onto the quiet street. A spotlight was directed onto the outdoor Christmas scene, and the colored lights that framed the porch were the finishing touches to our day's work.
In the corner of the living room, a Christmas tree brought home from the Little Belt Mountains reached to the ceiling and was decorated to it's fullest. Yet it would be another week before the gifts from Santa Claus would be under the tree.
Excitement was high in our house that day, what with the indoor and outdoor decorating, children trying on their costumes for the evening performance of the school Christmas program, and spritz cookies getting overdone in the oven.
"What would you like for Christmas," one sprightly child's voice asked me amidst all this flurry.
"A red sports car and a wide brimmed lavender hat." "Don't be silly Mommy," came a voice from underneath an angel costume. "What would you really like?" asked another with a mouth full of freshly baked spritz cookies. "I'll think about it." My answer seemed to suffice for the moment.
Back then, in 1956, money was in short supply, and I knew that the quarters our two oldest children had earned babysitting and doing odd jobs around the neighborhood would not go far. I also knew that I would have to give the two younger children Christmas shopping money and that small items at the local mercantile would be very limited. "Did you think of anything?" I was asked again when the family had settled to a more normal place. "I think some colored sewing thread would be nice," I suggested. In those days my sewing machine was in constant use, and not always did I have the color of thread that I needed.
My suggestion must have been satisfactory as not another word was uttered about a Christmas gift for me.
On Christmas morning, with eyes twinkling as bright as the lights on the Christmas tree, our four children urged me to open their gift first and handed me four small packages, unevenly wrapped and tied together with one ribbon. Their eyes were glued on me as I removed the wrappings, revealing their gift of colored sewing thread.
The spools of emerald green, purple, fire engine red, aqua, sunshine yellow, royal blue, lavender, pink and vivid orange would have matched the brilliance of a midsummer rainbow.
I know now why I kept the Christmas card made out of construction paper. The card is signed by the hands of our four children and the message reads, "A gift of color for our Mother."
This is my favorite Christmas story, which was published in the Bigfork Eagle 1987, and also in the December 1989 issue of Montana Magazine.