Special gifts for Christmas

This has been a season for unusual — and unusually meaningful — Christmas gifts.
It started when I was talking to my uncle Stu at the company’s Christmas dinner.
“I have something for you,” he said. “I’ll bring it tomorrow.”
Tomorrow in this case turned out to be the day of The Commercial Review’s annual Koffee Klatsch, a coffee and donuts gathering for the business community that the company has sponsored for more than half a century.
Sure enough, Stu showed up the next day with something in tow.
It was a painting.
Now anyone who has ever been to our house or has ever been in my office will tell you the last thing needed is something else to hang on the walls.
But this painting was different.
Stu said it had been a gift from my father to my grandparents. It had hung in their home in Richmond, and it had hung in my grandmother’s home in Portland.
I remembered it, though somewhat vaguely, and after thanking Stu I took it home.
There, thanks to some Internet research, I learned that the Indiana artist was born in Warsaw and died in Nashville. He studied at Herron and was a student of some well-known Hoosier artists. There’s even a market for his work, with paintings trading hands as recently as last fall on the East Coast.
Trouble is, I like the story more than I like the painting. But the family connection is so strong I don’t feel I can get rid of it.
At the moment, it’s in limbo.
Then there was our daughters’ gift to their mother.
She’s notoriously hard to shop for, but Sally hit on a neat idea.
Connie’s mother had owned a Super 8 movie camera and shot lots of film from about 1970 to 1983. With some careful sorting of the reels and some equally careful searching for someone with the right skills, Sally was able to get all of the movies converted to a single DVD.
It cost enough that the three daughters went together for the purchase, but it was well worth it.
There, on the TV, our twins were toddlers again. Connie’s parents were alive again.
The tears were inevitable, and the gift couldn’t have meant more.
And finally, there was the envelope that came from my brother Steve.
I read the note that came with the package, and it took all my will power not to rip the wrapping paper off then and there. I knew instantly what was inside, and I was instantly a kid again.
About the time I was 5 years old and my brother was 12, he wrote a story and illustrated it. He was incredibly talented with a pencil, and he’s still painting watercolors today.
The story — appropriately titled “The Big Story” — involved a little brother and big brother just like us who wake up one morning to find they are jellybeans. The train set in the basement is suddenly the size of a real locomotive. The stairs are like cliffs. The foot of a full-sized human is the size of a Buick. In the end, of course, they wake up from their dream.
But the adventure was terrific, and Steve’s illustrations are firmly fixed in my memory.
It seems that at one point, viewing it as a childish piece, he threw it away. Our mother rescued it from the trash and later gave it to Steve’s wife, who provided me with my own copy this Christmas.
Who could ask for more?
Memories, family ties, images that had been lost to time. And they were all restored in a single Christmas.[[In-content Ad]]