The gifts we leave behind
Thirty years ago, I gave a Christmas gift. Last week, it returned to me.
The perfume bottle would come back home with me. The pendant necklace, and the notecard too. And also, the jingle bell decorated with fake holly, which used to hang on her front door this time of year. I’d bat and paw it as a child, the incessant jangling of a cat determined to spread holiday cheer.
All these things and many more I packaged in tissue and bubble wrap. Tucked them amongst the dirty clothes in my suitcase; fabric packing peanuts for their flight back to California.
When my grandmother passed away at the end of October, I made plans to fly to Houston to organize and attend her memorial service in early December. I also made mental plans—which items from her home, the most constant of my life, would I want to take back with me? The big items, she’d discussed with us all in the last decade. But now, It’s a good opportunity for you to think about any smaller things you might want, my mother had told me.
The perfume bottle was the first thing I thought of. The necklace, second. Both were Christmas gifts I’d given her.
The former I’d discovered in a department store when I was 7 or 8 years old, accompanying my dad while he shopped for gifts one December in the early 90s. The pale lavender base of the bottle is bulbous. The top—the stopper—is shaped like a daisy, bubblegum pink and blooming open. Dad, I said when I espied it on a display case in the home decor department, Can we buy this to give to grandma? I think she will really love it.
And I was right. It sat on her vanity for more than three decades. She never filled it with anything, but its place of prominence amongst the creams and knickknacks and actual perfume seemed to point to a certain gift giving acumen. (Just a kid, and I nailed it, I remember thinking.) I gave her something she treasured. I knew her—the kind of knowing that exists when you and another human are on the same energetic wavelength. We did not agree on everything, and oh my god she could drive me crazy, but on matters of design, style, and beautiful things? We conversed fluently.
And so it went with other objects I rediscovered in her home last week. The thank you note card, violets adorning the front of it, which I’d sent after my high school graduation. (I barely recognized my own handwriting, but reading my words to her, was jettisoned back into my 17-year-old body, buoyant over my upcoming move to California and the freedom I could taste on the tip of my tongue.)
Little porcelain bunny figurines, which she’d displayed on tables around her house for as long as I have memory, and which my daughter had pet as if they were real when we visited her in October, just a few weeks before she died.
The necklace, a simple silver pendant embedded with a rainbow of linear, seed-sized stones, which I recall gifting her in the late 2000s, alongside a cashmere scarf that had made her list that year. Ironically, the scarf became an afterthought in her accessories drawer, and the necklace, the one she exclaimed over when she opened it that Christmas morning, was a favorite since.
On it goes, and I am almost embarrassed to admit to you the number of tchotchkes I brought home with me. I don’t even know where I am going to put all this, I kept saying to my mother as much as myself last week, yet still, my pile grew by the day. In my hoarding, a fear: I must hold onto these things in order to hold onto her.
Or perhaps something even more existential?
All these things—the gifts, the cards, the boxes full of photos I didn’t remember taking—if they were sold off or thrown away, they would cease to exist in my memory, and therefore, cease to exist at all. In this season of change and portals, I felt an urgent need to hold onto my grandmother as much as I felt a need to hold on to the old pieces of myself. Not to wish them back to life, so much as to keep them as records of the life that was. (What are the holidays, if not for nostalgia?)
On the flight home, I thought about the holiday ahead, my family heading westward in search of respite after the pain of the last several weeks. I thought about the gifts I’d already bought, wrapped and placed underneath the tree before I left for Texas. I don’t know that any will hit the mark the way the perfume bottle and the necklace did for my grandmother.
And yet—in this season of giving and receiving, it’s worth noting that even the most ingenious, thoughtful, brilliant gift means something only for a very short time. That love and vulnerability made tangible—I thought about you, from every angle, and landed on this item I think you’ll treasure—is a pact that exists between you and the recipient only while they are earthbound. When they are gone, that frisson of knowing between you lives in the object no longer. It hangs in the air for a little while, before hopefully, permanently, nestling into your heart.
Another confession.
When I unpacked the treasures from my grandmother’s house, I wondered how long I would keep any of them. For now, they are salves, a way for me to connect with her over our shared love of simple pleasures. But I also suspect that without her physical presence, how I made sense of the objects and the meaning she and I gleaned from them will go elsewhere, too. Maybe the meaning went with her.
I’ve pestered my mom and cousin about their wants and wishes while they are here for the holiday, anxious to soothe their spirits and help them relax after a very trying fall. They keep telling me: Honestly, we just want to be together. There is no object, no meal, no planned distraction that can replace the connection they crave, more than the presence of each other.
To breathe in the Pacific. To revel in shared memory. To be near.
The simplest gifts remain the most enduring.
