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Excerpted Inspirations #157

Writer's picture: Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz KufsLinda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
Dec 23, 20240 min read

[Twelve-year-old Jeremy Talbot is about to celebrate his first Christmas since his father died of cancer. Hoot is a little stone owl given to him by his father. Blue is his cat, and Tess is a recent friend.] He lay waiting for the tingling excitement that always came when you were in bed on Christmas Eve and knew that when you woke up it would be Christmas morning. This was the magic moment when Christmas really began. Through all the weeks leading to right now, he had been certain that even without his father, no matter where they moved, no matter who was spending Christmas with them, at this very moment a fountain of joy would spring up inside him. It always had. It always would. He felt no joy. Oh, he was looking forward to opening his gifts. But that was all. He lay dry-eyed, facing the truth that for the first time, it wasn’t going to come, not to him, not tonight, maybe never again. [...] [Jeremy wakes up early on Christmas morning and steals into the living room all by himself.] He […] turned to look at the row of stockings. Sarah’s was fat and knobbly and so were Aunt Margery’s, Tess’s and Mr. Medford’s. He kept his eyes averted from his own but he couldn’t help putting his hand out to feel it. He snatched his fingers away as he recognized the shape of the special pen he had asked for that wrote in six different colours. Then he saw that Mum’s stocking, which was next to his, was half empty. He lifted it to be sure he was right. There was a candy cane hooked over the top, but despite that cheerful note, it hung limply. He peered in and saw one mandarin orange and a Christmas cracker. Why hadn’t she filled her own? Jeremy sat down on the couch, pulled the afghan there around his shivering body, and thought. It was the kind of thinking he had not let himself do for a long time. But now there was no stopping it. Clearly, as if it were happening right now instead of last year and all the years before that, he saw his parents laughing as they dug into their Christmas stockings. They had acted every bit as silly and excited as he and Sarah. “They didn’t know what was in theirs either,” he said aloud. They never knew what they’d find next any more than he did. Last year his father had got a paperback murder mystery, some play money “to help with the mortgage,” a rubber spider, a chocolate cigar … and a little book saying how many calories were in everything. And Mum had had some pills with a note from Santa saying how sorry he was that she had to live with “three pains in the neck.” There had been a small bottle of perfume and a little wooden animal with pink fuzzy hair … Jeremy did not remember what else. He did not need to. He had just figured out something that had been obvious for years but that he had never before realized. Each of his parents had filled the other’s stockings. It must have been fun for them, he thought. Pain closed in on him as he lived back in those other Christmasses and saw, really saw, what fun it had been. This time he did not push the pain away. Jean Little, Mama’s Going to Buy You a Mockingbird (1984) pp. 206-207, 209-210 [Continued next week]

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