What Would You Pick?

The younger you are, the slower time passes. Then, when you’re my age, the days fly by like the rapid release of calendar pages in old movies. 

I only remember one Christmas from before the age of five. But it starts with an earlier memory. Was it a month before? Two, three months? At that age, it seemed to me a long span of time.

I was running through the kitchen to smash through the back door as I did every day to go play with my friends. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table flipping through a magazine and promptly stopped me before I hit the door.

“Come here for a minute,” she said, “I want you to look at something.” The magazine was open on the table and spread across the two open pages were toys of every kind. She asked, “If you could have anything here, what would you pick?”

I glanced at the pages and chose a monkey holding a banana, with a yellow vest, black legs, red suspenders, and white sneakers. And I ran off again, thinking nothing of it. Just a fun little game of “what would you pick?”

As I said, I don’t know how long it was between that incident and Christmas but on Christmas morning, that monkey was under the tree. Some sort of miracle!

I never believed in Santa Claus because at the age I might have, my brother thought it advisable to knock any silly notions out of my head by letting me know that he didn’t exist, the Easter Bunny was a sham, and the Tooth Fairy was a total fabrication.

So I knew it was from my mother. But how? How do you find something that was in a magazine and not a store? I was in awe of her ingenuity from a young age. Years later I learned the magazine was a Sears catalog, but it didn’t diminish the wonder of that morning. 

Through the years my mother has given some bizarre and humorous gifts mixed with some very thoughtfully chosen and/or handmade ones. Back then, If I believed Santa was a real person, and I were given the choice of gift-givers, I know who I would’ve picked.