Used with permission by the author

Oh boy, I thought. I wonder what this can be. A Christmas box from my sister. I’ll just give it a shake and guess at what’s inside.

Shake shake.

Hmmmm. Practically empty. Not like a gift at all. A hollow, loose rattle, like what you hear from castanets, or maybe from shaking a junk drawer. That cynicism continued to flood my thoughts like water from a slowly overflowing bathtub. Another shake, and the contents seemed to sound even looser as they tumbled over themselves. Maybe there was something darker or perhaps broken inside. Something sinister? The crunchy shaker-like reverberation was both alien and familiar, like ice sliding from a tin roof, or perhaps the sound of a fossil fuel sliding, grating and sluicing in some sort of chute.

Like coal?

Holding my breath I carefully tore at the packing tape, silently trying to remember how many ways I had antagonized my sister, and how to distinguish anthracite from bituminous. Would you still have to send a thank you note if someone sent you coal, I wondered as I spilled out the contents I knew had to be there.

At first nothing. Certainly, no whiff of black dust. No licorice-black clumps clattering onto my coffee table either. Another shake to jostle the items free. Not much inside at all. A couple of my childhood report cards, a newspaper clipping about me, a book report I wrote as a kid, my mother’s King James Bible and her metal crucifix, a gift mug bearing the family name. Irreplaceable things from a past that is as dim as a dream, so dim now that I can’t be sure any of it was real.

I breathed easy. And it wasn’t just the absence of coal. There were just those few fragile pieces in a box big enough to hold a full case of beer. Anything could have happened to these contents in the corrugated steamer trunk my sister had sent. The tossing of the parcel by careless delivery drivers, the crashing and banging of mail trucks over ill-maintained highways, even the sparks that must certainly fly from the runners on Santa’s sleigh while hurtling across metal drawbridges could have converted these contents to tatters and ashes. Anything could have happened. My report card crushed like Kleenex under a five pound Bible. The Bible itself, impaled on the metal crucifix. My school paper wrapped around the mug like cat fur wound onto a rotating vacuum cleaner drum.

Now, I don’t believe in spirits, but I knew that something magical had happened to prevent all that. But what? One final thump on the cardboard box yielded the answer. There it was, a single clump of bubble wrap. Not much larger than my two fists. My sister must have added the redoubtable wrap, not as a serious defender against damage, for it was a mere wisp, but more as a charm or talisman to ward off whatever evil a package might encounter. Somehow the hardy wrap had saved its fellow travelers from almost certain doom. Anyone could see that the wrap had been deflated in its transit tumbles. But that lonely bag of inert gas had remained in the ring, was ahead in points and taking names for the next bout.

That’s when the whole Christmas thing hit me right in the face like a sack of Santa toys carelessly flung into an unopened tailgate. I knew then that when it comes to Christmas it’s not the gift that counts, and it’s certainly not about the so-called “thought” either. Ultimately it all comes to the cardboard box and the packing material inside. You see, what God, or Santa, or Elvis, or whoever invented the world wants our souls to look like is a sturdy piece of bubble wrap that keeps our friends, families and neighbors from clanging and banging into each other, and from getting pulverized by insults, injury, hard feelings and general misery. As we all bounce around in the half-full cartons of our lives, it is the bubble wrap of other people that keeps us from becoming damaged in transit.

To be honest, I had wanted puppies for Christmas. And Linda could easily have sent two puppies in the box that she chose with plenty of room for food, water and even a couple of chew toys to enjoy on the trip. But I didn’t get those puppies. I didn’t get coal either. What I received was mostly paper, but paper that I will always treasure. That, plus one piece of bubble wrap, a souvenir from the best Christmas a guy ever had.