Christmas List

The eight-year-old goes to see Santa. After some small talk, he asks her what she wants for Christmas. She replies, “A ball of yarn.” He asks what for, and she explains that she is learning how to make yarn bracelets. He asks her what else she wants, and she replies, “Nothing. Just a ball of yarn. That’s all I want.” Santa presses her, insisting there must be something else. She maintains that there is nothing else. Santa presses on. Does she like dolls or video games? Clothes? Stuffed animals? “Just a ball of yarn,” the eight-year-old concludes firmly.

I am watching this exchange, and I am tempted to chastise Santa. Instead of suggesting there is something wrong with a child that wants only a ball of yarn for Christmas, why not praise her for knowing her mind and for not being greedy? A ball of yarn is enough for her. How many of us can be content with so little?

The line is long, and publicly chastising Santa seems a questionable approach to take. So I bite my tongue. As the eight-year-old comes back over to me, her five-year-old brother approaches Santa and begins the small talk.

“Am I supposed to want more than a ball of yarn?” the eight-year-old asks, clearly exasperated.

“No,” I tell her. “That’s perfectly fine.”

“I mean, I like to give presents more than I like to receive presents,” she explains.

The five-year-old is laying out his list to Santa. It has three items. 1. A Lego set. 2. A bow and arrow. 3. An Egyptian mummy. Santa seems more pleased with this list, though he is not sure he can fulfill the mummy request. “Well, an Egyptian mummy kit,” the five-year-old clarifies. “I guess the mummy doesn’t have to be real.”

Later, the visit to Santa over, the five-year-old says, “I don’t think my Christmas list is long enough.”

“Why do you think that?” I ask.

“Because all the kids at school have like a hundred things on their lists, and I have only three.”

The eight-year-old chimes in. “You don’t have to be like all the kids at school,” she says. “Three things is enough. It’s plenty. Besides, if you had a hundred things on your list, you’d never get them all anyway. And you don’t even want that much stuff. Trust me.”

I am certainly biased, but I’ll say it anyway: she is the wisest eight-year-old I have ever known. Instead of a Christmas list, she wrote this letter.

Listing

My lists are proliferating—lists of writing stuff, teaching stuff, kid stuff, household stuff, each main list branching into its own taxonomy of sub-lists and sub-sub-lists. Writing lists include “novel revisions,” “essays to write,” and even “blog”—which further branches into lists of blog entries that I aspire to write. I want to tell you about babies touching tree bark, about a day at the beach in Ventura, about trees we’ve planted, about a blue china box full of maple samaras from Omaha, about an accordion file stuffed to overflowing with 568 letters sitting right by my desk, and about my daughter’s toothbrush (to name just a handful of items on my “blog” list). But as always, my lists are in conflict, competing for my time, my attention.

When my daughter was three and my son a baby, we took a road trip from our home in Nebraska to Montana to visit family. I made endless lists to prepare for the trip—stuff for the three-year-old, stuff for the seven-month-old, stuff for the adults, perishable and nonperishable foods, stuff to do before we left, stuff my brother needed to do while we were gone, stuff I needed to do upon returning. I ended up with so many lists on so many different sheets of paper that I created a separate list—titled The Master List of Lists—to keep track of them all.

During the two-day drive, after having exhausted the picture books, sticker books, coloring books, and audio books, the three-year-old came up with an engrossing new activity. “Let’s make lists!” she cried exuberantly, so we occupied ourselves for the rest of the drive by making lists: Relatives We’re Going to See, Things We’re Going To Do, Favorite Songs, Favorite Numbers, Favorite Books, Reasons Baby Brothers Cry, Good Things to Eat, Beautiful Colors, Friendly Animals. She proudly held the growing stack of pages in her hands. I had—inadvertently—taught her well.

But later, back from our trip, we were sitting on our front lawn when my daughter curled into my lap. “I want to go back to Montana,” she told me. Distracted, I replied, “What were your favorite things about Montana? Let’s make a list.”

“Just being there,” she said. “It’s not something you put on a list.” And I will never forget the look of exasperation she gave me, the way she climbed out of my lap to go sit next to her brother who was chewing on a blade of grass, the way they both sat looking away from me at the crab apple trees in front of our house. Chastised, I watched my children sitting there as the deep blue began to seep into the sky, as the trees became dark silhouettes etched into the twilight. And I thought of all the things I did each day that never appear on a list: Read books with my children. Look at the sky. Enjoy an apple. Listen to a song. Tell a joke. Watch a bird. Touch a tree. These—and so many others—are beyond the reach of my lists.  

I sit writing this post—which I never planned to write, which wasn’t even on the list—and I watch the clock, trying to resist the urge to flip open my notebook. For the moment, I am here, but too soon I will be consulting the list, looking for the notation that will tell me where to go from here.