When You Lack A Green Thumb, Drive A Secret Sleigh

I know the last year has been rough on a lot of people but for my downstairs neighbors it seems (at least to me) it was borderline brutal. It started with his being laid off shortly before Thanksgiving last year and his only working hit and miss more or less, since them. She’s working a part time night job so she can still be home during the day to take care of their kids, a three year old boy and a now one year old girl. About all I’ve been able to do is offer whatever encouragement I can when I see him in the courtyard or pass her in the foyer. It’s tough to watch anybody go through hard times, but it made my annual Secret Santa decision much easier.

I started my sideline as a Secret Santa ten years ago when Brent and I first returned to Utah. That first Christmas we were transitioning from a rental house to the Willowcreek house we’d purchased and neither of us felt like having a traditional holiday. It was Brent’s idea to, rather than even attempt a regular holiday, spend three hundred dollars on toys and deposit them at the Lutheran Church we attended for their gift drive for needy kids. We had a great time shopping and enjoyed it, really, much more than we’d ever enjoyed shopping for each other because when it came right down to it we didn’t need anything. We followed the excursion with an entirely non-Traditional dinner at a local restaurant featuring cliff divers and it wasn’t so terrible, really, if you didn’t mind a very strong odor of chlorine with your meal.

Over the following years someone always came to mind between September and November, and for a couple of those years it was the three small children of a work associate who’d been killed in a car accident returning from a Nevada casino. When Brent and I split I considered disbanding the tradition altogether but that September there was another family in a tough spot so the decision was easy to make and I had to admit, carrying on the tradition made my first Christmas alone feel much better than it would have felt had I not done it. Last year, playing cards one evening at the invitation of my downstairs neighbors, I asked if they’d let me take care of Christmas. That was the first year I made the exception and rather than doing the actual shopping, I gave them cash, instead. Spirits being as low as they were in their household, I thought it was important they go out and shop for their kids, and they did.

This year I was on the fence about what to do but the decision was made for me two days ago when my neighbor let me know that, as if things couldn’t get any worse, his wife’s car had blown a fuel pump and they were looking at a five hundred dollar repair. Not welcome news just before Thanksgiving, and when his hours had just been reduced once more. “I’m sorry,” I told him, and I honestly was. “That’s the worst. But it does remind me…” and once again, I inquired if I could take care of the kids’ Christmas.

“Please let us know,” he said, “if there is ever anything we can do for you.”

What’s hard to explain is that they already do a lot for me, just by being great neighbors. I enjoyed having dinner and playing cards and playing with their kids a lot more than I’ve enjoyed black tie dinners at high end restaurants. The gift basket his mother left on my doorstep last Christmas was one of the best gifts I’d ever received because it was unanticipated, unexpected, and really, really thoughtful. Knocking on wood as I write this, but I’ve been through rough times and they’re just that much tougher to get through at the holidays. Alleviating even a part of the weight of that burden from someone else seems to me to be what the holiday is all about, anyway. Or maybe it’s hereditary, and it’s having grown up knowing once the temperatures dropped, my dad could be found walking through People’s Park in Berkeley in the dark, handing out new coats and sweatshirts to the homeless people sleeping there, every single winter. Or maybe it all comes down, at heart, to Emerson and his unforgettable quote (note I say ‘unforgettable’ but can’t quote the entirety, although it does appear on a large magnet on my fridge) : “…if you can touch another person’s life, or leave behind a garden….this is a life well lived.”

So that’s the rationale. As I struggle to keep even the most basic of houseplants alive and don’t have anywhere to plant an actual garden, at least for the foreseeable future, this particular Secret Santa isn’t going anywhere.