My $2.56 Christmas
My folks thought the best things in life were free, but they bent that rule for the Yule, which was why God made J.J. Newberry’s. You could get anything there, cheap.
I was eight years old, earning 10 cents a week allowance, the first time I went Christmas shopping. It was December 23, and my father needed help choosing a gift for my mother. I asked him to wait while I fetched my cache of coins, but he said no one expected me to buy them anything. That wasn’t the message I was getting at school, though.
Just that week, I’d ‘shopped’ the Sears Wish Book in math class using Monopoly money. Mrs. P said we each had $100 to ‘buy’ something for every member of our household, and I thought I’d heard wrong. My life savings was only $21, and that stayed in the bank. When she showed me how a hundred divided four ways came to 25 bucks apiece, I pictured a new saw for my father, a necklace for my mother, a bike for one brother and the Lost in Space robot for the other. Then I checked the prices and wound up with a dress shirt, a casserole dish and two bathrobes. It was depressing.
As we walked to Newberry’s, the air was crystalline with a haze of snow. Our rubber boots squeaked in time with Petula Clark’s hit, Downtown, on the sidewalk speakers. We slogged through the slush at the entrance and into a blast of warm, peanut-scented air. I unhunched my shoulders and withdrew a fist from my corduroy coat pocket to check the knot on the poinsettia hanky I’d tied around my jingly savings: $2.56, as weighty as King Tut’s treasure.
I quickly found two books for my brothers and some leopard-themed perfume for my mother. But that left only 36 cents for my father’s gift. I left him on the main floor and ran down to the tool department, where dozens of gadgets hung on a pegboard. There wasn’t much for under a dollar, and he owned most of it already, but there was one item he didn’t have: a tiny vial of yellow water with hooks and an air bubble trapped inside. I didn’t know what it was for, but he probably needed it and it was only 28 cents. I couldn’t believe my good fortune, and neither could he on Christmas morning. “A line level!” he exclaimed. “How did you know?”
The next day, he tore up our cracked sidewalk and poured a new one, hanging the level just-so along the wooden forms. When he was done, we had the best walkway on Ridges Court, and I wondered how many line levels I could buy for the price of one shirt that would hang, unused, in a working man’s closet.
Bay Weekly contributor and theater reviewer, Jane Elkin returns after a two-year sabbatical to earn her master degree’s in creative writing.