Our terrier Paris watches me when I eat.
She sits and waits, focusing her golden eyes on my sandwich or bowl of grits. We have an agreement: If she behaves and is not pushy, I will give her the last bite. Or the last few bites. So she stays rapt until I signal, with a glance or subtle shrug, that she is welcome to my plate. She laps it up with gratitude and dispatch.
I have heard someone, maybe professor of animal sciences Temple Grandin, say that for most creatures, the anticipation of getting a good thing is more pleasurable than actually getting a good thing. Watching Paris, I suspect this is so for her-there’s nothing better than watching me sit down to eat. If she were hungry, there are bowls of food available to her.
The waiting is more delicious than the having.
That is how Christmas was when I was a child; in September, Sears would send out its Christmas Catalog, eventually officially named the “Wish Book” after the colloquialism. In 1968, this catalog was 605 pages long, with 225 pages devoted to toys.
I still see some of those pages laid out in my mind-the battery-operated James Bond Aston Martin ( there’s one available on eBay for $350), the five-speed Spyder bikes for $72.95 (with “powershift”), a battery-operated projector (with five films) for $13.99, Johnny West and his horse Comanche, pages of slot cars and model trains, musical instruments like the folk guitar with a braided silken cord attached to the headstock instead of a strap. I remember these gifts I never got, that I never even asked for, better than most of the presents I did receive.
I remember the waiting for Christmas much more vividly than the inevitably anti-climatic morning.
Growing up, my family was not substantially different from our neighbors; I know I was as acquisitive and greedy as any of my friends. I wanted as hard as anyone. I just realized early that there was no Santa Claus. And while my parents loved me, they were practical children of the Depression whose values were inconsistent with heavy seasonal spending.
We had a tree and a few strands of lights, a turkey or ham and midnight Mass. We had Holiday Sing-Along With Mitch Miller, A Charlie Brown Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The few token presents were part of Christmas, but we weren’t supposed to consider them the point of everything.
There was a set of golf clubs when I was 13, and-probably the year before-a regulation NFL football with Pete Rozelle’s name emblazoned on it. And there was a year when my sister, 18 months younger than me, and I got matching-sort of-bicycles. (Mine was red where hers was blue and had the obligatory gender-specific top tube, but otherwise they were identical.)
And in 1970 my father came home from Southeast Asia a couple of weeks before Christmas. We met him on the tarmac of Edwards Air Force Base when he disembarked from a military transport plane. He brought me a Pachinko machine, a Seiko watch and a Hitachi cassette player.
But most years we didn’t get big gifts at Christmas; each of us kids got one sort of medium-big gift (typical was the Strat-a-matic Baseball board game, which I cherished and wish I still had) and a few wrapped practical items. Sweaters. School clothes. A lot of books.
That’s not to suggest I was deprived or unhappy, only that I never got the minibike or the drum kit or machine gun (or even the Polaris submarine that shot torpedoes and was big enough for two kids and was on offer for only $6.95in the back of the comic books) that I “really wanted” for Christmas. I never felt entitled to having my wishes fulfilled; I never expected anything expensive.
My father always did an excellent job of managing expectations. Every year, around about the time he pushed away from Thanksgiving dinner, he would start to poor-mouth about how this year Christmas was likely to be a leaner one than previous years, that we’d be lucky if we got an apple or an orange or a pair of socks. We knew he was teasing us; as a child I never felt any genuine economic insecurity (even though I now realize there might have been some), but I also knew better than to set my sights too high.
I don’t think my sister understood this as well as I did. I have a vague memory of her tearing up when she realized that, once again, there was no Christmas pony grazing in the backyard. (For my other sister, 10 years younger than me, a different dynamic applied. My parents’ circumstances changed and she got whatever she wanted. But never mind that.)
These days our Christmases are still modest. We have friends over, we have wine, good food and conversation. We may have gifts, but not always. We have each other, and the attention of our little dogs.
I cannot wait.
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——— Philip Martin is chief film critic, Moviestyle editor, and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial, Pages 13 on 12/23/2013