Christmas 2017: A Misleading Box.

The box with his name on it under the tree taunted him throughout December. He could see the name of the store through the thin paper. Cosby’s, a famous hockey store in New York City. Each night laying in bed, he wondered what it might be. Skates? Helmet? It didn’t matter. Either way, he would have something to impress the kids at school, something to be like his brother who got things from there all the time.

He tried to get his siblings to hurry through their stockings on Christmas morning so he could get downstairs for the main event. His mother’s torturous requirement that they eat before opening presents almost caused him to go into convulsions.

Finally, his mother “dropped the puck,” as they liked to say, “Ok, you may open it.”

He didn’t wait for the others. He ran to the tree and went straight to the box he’d been waiting to open for a month. The paper didn’t stand a chance against his enthusiasm, and pieces were still floating in the air as he lifted the top of the box. In it was a painting his mother had done in one of her painting classes.

He tried to hide his disappointment. To this day, he can’t recall anything else he received that Christmas. The painting was eventually hung in his room, where he stared at it from his bed. In time, he grew to like the painting, and stopped thinking about what could have been in the box. When he went to college, he took the painting with him, and, when he moved into his first apartment, the painting was the first thing he hung on the wall.

The painting was like having his mother with him. It got him through the time he was laid off, as well as when his daughter was in the hospital. Now, with his gone, the painting increased in significance.The individual brushstrokes looked like her fingerprints which, in a way, they were. The painting was never something he expected, but ended up being all he ever wanted.

"And you shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger."