Essay: Christmas gifts three months early
remember the CD that came with the box, which contained my father’s taped messages to all of us.
It contained words that I’m sure many sons and daughters have heard: study well and work hard, respect old people and don’t forget to pray. And whatever you do during weekdays, don’t forget to go to Mass on a Sunday. That last request I followed all the years I was studying abroad. My classmates and I would dance in the clubs on a Saturday night, but on a Sunday morning, I would be there, at Robbins Hall, bug-eyed from lack of sleep, attending my Catholic Mass with a priest from Kenya who gave the most moving homilies.
It’s such an irony that the farther one goes away, the nearer he becomes. Those years when my father was so far away were the years he wrote to us — or told us through those CDs — what he felt. In his letters and in those tapes, thousands of miles away, my father’s deep and sad voice sounded so urgent and so near.
Thus, a gathering of gifts: voices and photographs, cassette tapes and books, cards and good wishes.
This year, the early birds included a friend of mine who now teaches at a university’s Department of English. She gave me
edited by Jenny Newman. In her note, she called me “my teacher in literature and seduction.” Hmmm. May
Books like Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke are good gifts to give on Christmas because their value will last beyond this season of cheer she keep her boyfriend long and well.
Suddenly I recall a sculpted piece of chocolate I got from an artist-friend. It’s thick and dark chocolate in the shape of a penis. The moment I got it I rang it up and asked her, “Who was the model for this?”
She did not laugh; no, she cackled on the other end of the line. And then her revelation: “Frankly, my dear, I patterned it after a consul’s dick.” “Which embassy?” I asked. She told me later, but I’m not saying from which embassy, not until hell freezes over.
In the past years, I have received a gaggle of gifts. They fell neatly into two categories: sex and religion.
of truly hairy creatures from this famous gift shop. You lift this guy’s long bangs and voila! You have the guy’s pink appendage hanging pendulously between his legs. Well, this must be Gen Y’s version of the wooden man in a barrel from Baguio.
From two giggly girls I got a white T-shirt with “Boners” silk-screened on it. But do these girls know what a boner means? In the middle of the shirt are eight sets of skeletons. They could look like coconut trees swaying in the wind. But no, these two skeletons are making out in all imaginable positions!
Salvation was the other category. One of my friends, a very pious girl, gave me a big rosary that glows in the dark. Two other girls in the next section gave me not one, but two, images of the Blessed Virgin Mary. One of my friends, a very pious boy, gave me a wooden cross with this note, “No more naked boys, please.”
a cinematic version of the late Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s excellent novella. But the young man supposedly plays the role of a young angel called Gabriel. He wants to save the young sex worker Erendira from her heartless grandmother, but instead, he falls in love with her. And then the angel and the sex worker make love.
In hindsight, I really do not know what I have said that made some of my friends give me images from the Catholic iconography. It’s as if they want to save me, or to bring me back to the straight and narrow path. Good luck to them
From a poet and friend, I also received a book wrapped in beautiful paper you wouldn’t want to tear. The book is Rainer Maria Rilke’s
as translated by Stephen Mitchell. I’d lost my copy of Rilke’s book, which was sent to me by a poet now living in the United States.
Mitchell is a brilliant translator. His foreword reads: “I felt, as many readers have felt, that the letters were pages, where solitude is considered a positive experience, my life seemed to acquire a new clarity and sanction. So even before I read a line of Rilke’s poetry, I regarded him as a spiritual teacher and came to treat him, in that small, light-green covered book, with the greatest respect, the way some people keep their copy of the I Ching wrapped in silk.”
May you have gifts as meaningful as I have received in the coming Christmas, and in the Christmases to come.