Well my Christmas plot to keep Maria from finding out much about her Christmas present – I’ve been plotting this for months – largely collapsed yesterday, to the gentle ridicule of many people on Facebook. “Well, duh –” was one comment. I had told Maria I wouldn’t be blogging until after Christmas, figuring she wouldn’t check the blog out. But she did, of course, as everyone but me realized she would.
The good news is that she still doesn’t know what I got her, and the other good news is that she doesn’t really want to know. “I like being surprised on Christmas,” she said joining in the general jeering. “I don’t want to know.” All right, I was wrong. Okay, okay, so I am not as clever as I thought, and she is. She knows I was fiddling with her computer, asking her for her passwords, and she nearly caught me trying to set the thing up. Bloody, but unbowed.
I will sneak it into my luggage and give it to her in Brooklyn Christmas morning. She will, I think, be surprised, still. Next year I will start earlier and think harder. Maria does not buy herself things – she nearly checked herself int the hospital when she bought a sewing machine earlier this year. I love to buy people presents, one of the Big Shot residues I hope to be able to keep. And I love to buy her presents especially.
Maria is herself the most wonderful present I could possibly have been given. She is the gift of love. She radiates love – for me, the earth, the animals and birds, for life. This is something I have wanted all of my life, and the strange thing about life is that if you wanted to find a place where you were never likely to find this kind of love, you’d go to a small hamlet in upstate New York on a 90-acre farm where there are hardly any people. Go figure. We had been looking for one another for years and so I never forget what the real gift of Christmas in, and I think that love is really what this holiday is about, along with gifts surely.
Every day I remind myself that there is love and beauty and light in the world, no matter what cruelties and anger their news sells us every day. We do not have to buy it. A woman e-mailed me that she was cutting the news down to 30 minutes a day. My wish for her is that she cut it by another 30. Love and light and connection and creativity are big stories, and here, as recent weeks have shown. I hope they are all wrapped up for you under the tree.