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The best Christmas gift I ever got, hands down, was an Easy-Bake oven.
Since it came from seriously frugal parents back before a kid's Christmas take required renting a U-Haul, it also was a gift for my older sister, whom I worshipped, a boon for me, a pain for her.
By now, there's probably an Easy-Bake Viking oven in an Easy-Bake gourmet kitchen with tiny appliances from Williams-Sonoma, kid-size granite countertops and an Italian tile backsplash. Our plastic Easy-Bake cooked a tiny cake by the heat of a light bulb, which took roughly a century, and when it was more or less done, you were supposed to let it cool before you frosted it. We could not wait. We served mush-in-the-middle cake with an icing like sticky glue, which, unbelievably, our parents ate.
It was cool anyway. I accomplished something (sort of) that I hadn't before, the previous Charred Chocolate Pudding For Dessert incident notwithstanding. Even now when I bake, it's this sort of therapy of using your hands and not so much your brain. Do kids get gifts like that still?
Growing up in Miami, I did not have a fireplace, much less a mantle, but my family did have two frantically busy working parents, and so the stockings that appeared at the foot of our bunk beds Christmas morning were made of red plastic netting in shrink-wrap. (Apparently, Santa shopped at Eckerd Drugs back before he started filling stockings with Godivas, iPhones and Aeropostale gift cards.) It bought our parents an extra hour of sleep while we tore them open and ate our weight in candy and whacked each other with those paddles with the rubber balls attached.
When we went Christmas shopping yearly for new clothes that would appear under the tree, I opted to ride the escalators up and down until the others were done, letting someone else do the picking. This is how one year I ended up with a pair of flood pants, the kind that hit you at the ankle, possibly the most unforgivable fashion sin in all of junior high.
I'm not blaming my sister, exactly, though she did also generously offer to trim my bangs one Christmas vacation with blunt-nosed kid scissors. Thrilled by the attention, I said yes, the result being a look made famous by one of the Three Stooges, specifically Moe, not that any of them would have been good. And no, it did not grow out by the time school resumed.
And so we grew up, and later came the Christmases when it seemed we bought and bought and bought.
It got so excessive that for a while there, we drew names for a family gift exchange. One year, my brother-in-law said it would be fun if we didn't tell each other whose name we got. Naturally, on the way home I told my husband I had gotten his brother, and he said no, he had gotten his brother. Similar conversations were simultaneously taking place in other households, and it turned out that my brother-in-law's was the only name on those pieces of paper. What a coup for him it would have been, were we not all chronic rule-breakers.
But the world, not to mention the economy, shifted again, and this year we are all about practicality: clothes, gift cards, necessities. Still, there is room for nostalgia. I'm not saying what I got my sister, though I did not find an Easy-Bake or a shrink-wrapped stocking.
She might need a haircut, though, or some really fashionable pants.
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