I was so proud of my gift. It was a piece of me, a big piece—it weighed nearly 10 pounds. I sent it back to the Skook because I would not be there at Christmastime.
First the big box of French chocolates, lavish, extravagant, an exercise in overkill. What was I trying to do, make my family sick?
Then the individual gifts, something for everyone, all eleven of them, gathered around the Christmas tree—and thinking of absent me. In French, there’s an expression, “l’oncle de l’Amérique,” the black sheep in the family who disappears. He’s run away, gone to America. When he shows up again a few years later, he’s a new man, a rich man, laden with gifts.
I wanted to be la tata from France, the black sheep of an aunt who made the wild decision to pull up roots and start all over again on another continent. Upon my triumphant return, I too would be loaded down with gifts—I mean, my package, my substitute me.
I wrapped them in pretty paper, one each, for my sisters, my brothers-in-law, my nieces and nephews, my three great-nieces. The time and effort I put into it, right down to waiting in a hot, crowded post office on an icy cold day! Everyone, except the postal workers, was overdressed.
The next day I came down with a cold. I’m sure I picked it up there. The French cluster when they stand in line. You can be sure you’ll have someone breathing down your neck.
I posted the package on Friday, December 13th. It was doomed from the start.
I’d bought one of those sturdy, prepaid boxes, guaranteed tracking and fast service. For once, I filled out the customs forms with rigor, right down to the number of grams when adding up the weight.
I did everything right and, oh, miracle, a week to the day the package was sitting on my sister Jane’s front porch. She was in charge of Christmas dinner. She’d also be in charge of sharing the chocolates and handing out the gifts. As soon as the package arrived, she sent me a message on WhatsApp.
Mission accomplished. Through my munificence, my virtual presence at Christmas dinner would be assured.
Why go away? Why give yourself all that trouble when you live in a country that has millions clamoring at its gates to get inside. Work, housing, clean water, a luxury for hundreds of millions around the world. Just imagine if in the morning before brushing your teeth, you had to draw water at a distant well, lug it home in jerricans, and then boil it. All that before the first cup of coffee of the day! In those conditions, we might all want to move somewhere else.
But when you have all that already, that and so much more?
I’ve been asking myself that question for years.
Two days before Christmas, my sister phoned. An exchange of chitchat and then the news:
The package. A problem.
The contents crushed?
No.
Ransacked?
No.
What?
Ants.
Ants? The temperature’s below freezing. There are no ants at this time of year.
Believe me. Ants.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of ants, crawling in the chocolates stacked in layers in a ballotin, a box designed especially for sweets, wrapped, not sealed, in a plastic bag. And from there the little critters spread out, probably seeking a place to quietly digest after having gorged themselves on chocolate, nestling among the creases of paper, the folds of fabric (dance clothes for my little nieces), the crinkles of cellophane wrapped around chocolate lollipops (for my little nieces, once again).
The day the package arrived, my sister carried it inside and set it on a dining room chair. She’d open it later, when she got home from work.
When her husband and son sat down for dinner, my nephew picked it up.
The box was alive! My nephew’s hands, crawling with ants; the chair, crawling with ants, and they were swarming up my nephew’s arms and down the chair legs to the floor. The kitchen was not far away. Soon they would take over, exotic, alive-in-the-dead-of-winter, bursting forth from-God-knows-where ants!
Only one solution. Exile. My nephew carried the box outside to the porch. The temperature was well below freezing. No ant could survive long in weather like that.
They didn’t. They froze to death. Dead ants. A big box filled with them.
My father liked Jerry Lewis, his movies and his TV show. He took me to see Jerry Lewis make a fool of himself at the Capitol and the Hollywood in Pottsville. Was it there or on TV that I saw the toasted-ants routine, ants floating in chocolate sauce. I loved chocolate. As a child, my fondest wish was to throw myself into a giant vat of it at the Hershey Chocolate factory. Would I dare eat a chocolate if I knew there was an ant inside?
Yes, I would. That’s how much I loved chocolate.
Would my family, all eleven of them gathered on Christmas Day, choose an exquisite dainty from a vast array of French chocolates that foreign or domestic ants—who knows?—had crawled on, nibbled, shared as ants do, defecating, coupling, living their ant lives, as they travelled thousands of miles around the globe?
No, they would not.
My gift, so proudly and lovingly prepared, had become an outcast.
Guilt by association. When my sister told me, I felt like those ants were crawling all over me.
And the clothing? The vacuum-packed delicacies, hummus with seaweed, deer pâté, tea, sea salt with spices and fresh herbs? Would they be rejected too?
When we last spoke, my sister didn’t have an answer for me.
“The best laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry,” wrote Robert Burns, addressing himself to a little “mousie” whose winter home was destroyed by the plow. How often do we stop to wonder at our good fortune in life ? We awake in the morning, we go to bed at night, food, water, warmth and shelter as natural to us as the air we breathe. Shouldn’t we rather marvel that we have a sturdy roof over our heads?
The little Matchgirl died on Christmas eve, huddled in a damp corner between two houses, outside in the cold, striking against a wall the matches she was to sell before she could return home, seeing in the flames the wonders and abundance of Christmas that she had never known. Then she froze to death.
Who hasn’t felt like an outcast at some point in their lives? When I was a little girl, my Aunt Jean painted my fingernails red. At nursery school, when we sang “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” the teacher made me keep my hands folded on my lap (red was the devil’s color) while all the other children wiggled their fingers in the air.
Why go away? As many answers as there are stars in the sky and not one seems to get it quite right.
And as the saying goes, with gifts, it’s the thought that counts.
Wonderfully heartfelt as are all this writer’s posts. Read her. Phyllis Mass