posted on Dec, 26 2010 @ 01:02 AM
First boyfriend gave me a diamond ring for Christmas, or so he said.
What he actually gave me was a lay-by docket with $1 payed off.
Every year while I was married my mother would give my husband a bottle of aftershave -
the same one every year, because he'd always give it straight back, explaining his voluptuous beard was staying put.
One year she gave me a present too, a calendar from the local greengrocer.
She said it should be handy to have one with all the months on the one page so I wouldn't have to tear a page off each month.
My husband's family had an interesting Christmas custom. Every year they would all exchange presents. However these were never opened because they
knew what was in each one already. The following year the gift-tags would get changed and the gifts would be given out again, seemingly at random.
An aquaintance offered me a unique gift one year. He was not a close aquaintance because he was creepy and repulsive. He decided he was going to give
me his virginity.
I explained that virginity was like poorly corked wine, at 50 years old the fruitiness had turned to vinegar and it would have no trace of woodyness
left.
Besides, the gift would have been useless to me. Once he gave it neither of us would have it, and there was no way I was going to be able to return it
if he wanted it back.
The resident cat says the funniest Christmas present ever was my son, who was apparently given to him 12 Christmases ago. Apollo is still working on
training him, hoping one day he'll make a half-decent tall, hairless imitation of a two-legged cat.
The worst present my kids nearly had was Christmas day 1001. I was in a coma for a week after a back operation had gone wrong, but the hospital had
not told them that, and they were coming in to see me for Christmas. I'd been able to hear all week, but couldn't open my eyes or breath, and was
being kept alive with tubes. Because I seemed brain-dead, the doctors were quite uninhibited about discussing my situation in front of me, and I knew
they were afraid of having another family fight to keep a comatose patient on life support when the hospital was short of resources, and they had
transplant patients lined up for pretty well all my innards.
So I knew what was happening, but I was determined to live because my kids needed me. So I wouldn't let my mind shut down and drift away as it wanted
to do. Death would have been so easy. Instead I kept making it solve maths problems to get it working again. I kept trying to move and breath, but my
body wouldn't respond.
Then, Christmas morning, I overheard that my kids were coming, and the doctors, in a panic, decided to switch off life support before they arrived and
just tell them I hadn't made it through the night. So it was curtains for me - being pulled around my bed in the critical care ward. The tubes were
pulled out and I knew this was my last chance to make my body breath. As has been said before, imminent death concentrates the mind most wonderfully.
But the thought of my loving children, being reminded by every Christmas for the rest of their lives of the day they went to see their mum in hospital
and found only an empty bed, was even more powerful.
Some might call it a Christmas miracle. I call it the inner resources we all have, waiting to be tapped when the need and determination are great
enough.