My daughter Annie, who, among the many amazing things she does, operates a mobile bookstore (soon to become a brick-and-mortar bookstore!) in Colorado, wrote recently, “I consider myself so lucky to come from a family of readers, writers, librarians, and other educators. My love of reading started early.”
My own love of reading started early, too. One of my writing group’s recent prompts was to “tell about your most special Christmas gift, and what made it special,” and while I’m not sure the gift I described receiving nearly sixty years ago was my most special one ever, in a way it really was my “key to the treasure.”
It’s Christmas morning, 1966, and still very early. I am seven years old and I can’t get back to sleep. I wonder if my sister is awake in her bedroom on the other side of the bathroom, or my brothers, bundled under piles of blankets in their big, cold room down the hall.
Maybe it’s almost time for us all to get up and go downstairs to see if Santa came. If he did, the stockings we hung beside the fireplace last night before bed will be bulging with small, interestingly-shaped packages, with a candy cane at the top and an orange in the toe.
We always bring our stockings to the big table in the dining room to open while we eat breakfast, carefully averting our eyes from the presents under the tree as we carry them past it, saving our first glimpse of those for after we’ve eaten and the dishes have been cleared away.
Because she knows it’s hard to wait, my mother will have set the table the night before. She will have sliced the grapefruit into halves, loosened the sections with a special curved knife, and topped each half with a bright red cherry before placing them on a tray and sliding it into the refrigerator, ready to be set at each of our places as soon as we come downstairs.
The rectangle of sky I can see through the high dormer window above my bed is still black, but at this time of year, on school days, I have to get up in the dark to get ready, so maybe it’s almost 7:00 already. I feel for the flashlight on my nightstand and aim the beam at the clock on the wall across my tiny bedroom.
Darn, it’s not even 4:00 yet, hours before sunrise and too early for even my early-rising family to appreciate being awakened. I flop back onto my pillow and fix my gaze on the window, wondering how I’ll ever be able to wait until the sky lightens to gray.
After a few minutes, I get up to use the bathroom, slipping through the low, hobbit-sized door that leads to it from my bedroom, the one I call my secret door. The other way in and out of my room is through my mother’s bedroom, and I don’t want to wake her up, because I’ve just had an idea.
I leave the bathroom by way of the regular, human-sized door and creep down the dark staircase as quietly as I can, wishing I had brought my flashlight. When I push open the door at the bottom, there’s just enough light from the streetlights coming through the dining room windows to keep me from bumping into the table as I pass through to the living room.
In the wide doorway between the rooms, I stop short. The lights on the Christmas tree in front of the big picture window are on, bathing the room in soft color, and by their light I can see that the stockings hanging from the mantle are filled to overflowing, and the floor around the tree is piled high with packages.
Knowing I could get in trouble—I’m not even supposed to see them yet, let alone go through the pile, looking at all the tags—I nevertheless abandon caution and start digging. I’m thrilled to see my own name on so many of them, although, as the youngest in the family by nearly a decade—the only child, really, in a family of adults—I’ve almost come to expect that this is how it will be.
I give each package a gentle shake and try to guess what’s inside. One box that gives an intriguing rattle might be a game with lots of small pieces, or a kit to make some kind of craft. Another is the right size and shape for a jigsaw puzzle, and the muted sound it makes when I shake it could definitely be from the cardboard pieces sliding around in the box.
I’m tempted to loosen the Scotch tape on every one of them, just enough to expose a corner of the box, but I don’t let myself go that far. If I were caught doing that, I really would be in trouble, and, besides, none of these packages is what I’m looking for just now.
I unearth two or three wrapped boxes that are almost certainly clothes, then bury them again in the pile, hoping I’m wrong, or that, at least, they’re not underwear and socks. Then, under another probably-clothes gift addressed to my sister (who actually thinks new clothes are somewhat exciting, especially if they’re store-bought instead of homemade), I find a flat package, too slender to be a box, and slightly heavy for its size.
It can’t be anything but a book, exactly what I’ve been searching for, and this time I do loosen the tape, very cautiously, and only the piece that holds the flap of wrapping paper, folded to a point, in place at one end, being careful not to tear it. I peek in, just to be sure, and see the edges of the pages and a yellow cover.
I carry the book, still wrapped, to the couch, where I sit down and slide it ever so carefully out of the paper and onto the coffee table so I can read the title. Key to the Treasure. Tucking my bare feet up under my nightgown, I open the book and, by the red and green and yellow and blue lights of the Christmas tree, begin to read.
I only intend to read a chapter or two, just long enough to get sleepy; then I’ll slip back upstairs and crawl into bed, and no one will ever know. But the book turns out to be a mystery, the first one I’ve ever read, and I find myself turning page after page as I wait for my eyelids to grow heavy. It’s beginning to grow light outside the windows when I finish the last chapter and close the book. I slide it back into the paper, press down on the tape to securely reseal it, and push it deep into the pile under the tree.
As I tiptoe back up the stairs, I can hear my mother moving around in her room. Holding my breath, I slip into the bathroom, then through my secret door, and dive under the covers of my bed, just as the door that connects our rooms opens.
“Merry Christmas!” my mother says.
I open my eyes, stretch, and give what I hope is a convincing yawn. “Is it time to get up already? Do you think Santa Claus came?”
Peggy Parish’s The Ghost of Opalina is one of my childhood favorites! They reissued it so I was able to find a copy! It still holds up, even reading it as an adult, as all great children’s books do!
You were so much more brazen than I. Christmas was such a magical time for us as well, but I would never have dared visit the tree before morning! Lovely memories.