“Great.”
“Are you excited about the upcoming Christmas holiday? And putting up your Christmas tree?” Mr. Grant asked, his deep voice booming in the relative quiet.
“My family doesn’t celebrate Christmas. But even if we did, we couldn’t afford a tree.”
The couple exchanged glances before Mr. Grant cleared his throat. “Um, we’re getting a new artificial tree this year. Would you like our old one?”
“You can have our old decorations, too,” Mrs. Grant chimed in. “I’ve decided to get all new ones this year.”
I swallowed, letting their words sink in. “Are you sure?” I couldn’t believe our good fortune!
“Of course. We’d really like your family to have them.” Mrs. Grant hugged me. “Anything for our favorite babysitter.”
I smiled and thanked them and then ran all the way home. I stopped for a moment to catch my breath before going into the house.
Hyrum and Manuel were playing cards on the showroom floor. “Where’s Mom?”
“She’s cooking dinner.”
I hustled into the kitchen, my heart pounding both from running and the excitement of possibly having our first Christmas tree. Mom was taking garlic bread out of the oven, and the aroma filled the tiny kitchen. A pot of water was boiling on the stove for pasta. Suddenly I remembered my mission. “Mom, can we get a Christmas tree?”
“No, they cost too much.”
I’d started with that question simply to trap her. I knew if she went with the excuse that a tree cost money, she wouldn’t have a defense when I posed the next question. “What if I told you we can have one for free?”
“I’d say, ‘How can we do that?’”
“You know the Grants, the couple I babysit for?”
Mom nodded as she poured the cooked noodles into the plastic strainer in the sink.
“Well, they’re throwing away their old Christmas tree, and they said we could have it. So we get a tree, and it’s free. Oh, and their old decorations, too.”
“Are we going to celebrate Christmas?” said Celia from the doorway. I had no idea that Christmas marked the celebration of the birth of Jesus. Acknowledging Him never entered into the equation. I did know about Santa Claus, though.
I turned and grinned at her. “What do you think, Mom? Can we get it and put it up in the house?” I paused for effect. “Pleeeze.”
Mom wiped her hands on her apron, leaned her head to one side, and sighed. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, Anna. But, yes, you may go get the tree after dinner. We may as well take it, if it’s free.”
Celia, Hyrum, and I rushed through dinner. Then the three of us dragged the tree and carried the box of decorations from the Grants’ house to ours and set it up in an upstairs room. We spent the rest of the evening making popcorn and stringing it onto thread for the tree. The next afternoon, Mom brought home a couple of strands of lights. We laughed and sang Christmas carols while we wrapped the lights around the branches and painstakingly placed the decorations —silver tinsel and red and green balls —on the tree.
Once we finished, Mom found an extension cord to plug in the lights. “Here, Anna, since you found us the tree, you get to do the honors.”
As I inserted the plug into the extension cord, Mom turned out the overhead lights. The room was transformed with the soft glow from the Christmas lights. The beauty and calm of the scene took my breath away. I didn’t care that my dad was dead. I didn’t care that we still had Beverly’s and Mary Lou’s kids living with us. I didn’t care that I had to wear hideous glasses to read the board at school. Everything paled in comparison to the serenity of that moment.
That first Christmas celebration was memorable for other reasons, too. We actually had money to buy real presents for each other; we had saved from the money we earned at the warehouse, helping the sister-wives, and outside babysitting jobs. All of us siblings planned and schemed, both together and separately, about all the things we wanted to buy each other. I specifically remember all of us girls pooling our money to buy Beverly’s son, Sean, a navy blue velour robe that we had seen in an ad from Palais Royal. I think it cost twenty-nine dollars on sale. With so many of us living under the same roof, the mound of presents under the tree grew higher and wider during the weeks before Christmas.
I also got to witness true love in action. My eighteen-year-old sister Kathleen was deeply in love with her boyfriend, Jim, who lived in Denver. He was not a member of our church, which made Mom and others in leadership determined to make Kathleen break it off. Despite everyone’s attempts to separate them, Kathleen had secretly kept in touch with him by paying her friends to let her use their family’s phone to call him. Ever since we’d moved to Houston, she and Jim had written faithfully to each other. If Kathleen knew she wouldn’t be home in time to pick up the mail before Mom, she asked me to check it, in case there was a letter from Jim. If there was, I picked it out of the pile and left the rest for Mom to retrieve. I obliged because I thought the idea of their love was so romantic.
I was impressed when Kathleen boldly invited Jim to join our family for Christmas. Even more unbelievable? Jim accepted the invitation. He arrived two days before Christmas to stay for a long weekend. Mom didn’t want him to come —at all. Mom and the other sister-wives were afraid of Kathleen and Jim being together. They didn’t want anyone from the outside to come in because they feared losing control of us kids and our closed family. She and Kathleen argued about it, but my sister stood her ground.
Seeing the two of them together impressed on me what young love looked like. Other than Rena’s recent marriage, the other marriages in our family had all been arranged. So getting to witness the affection and closeness of two young people truly in love broadened my outlook. Their relationship, along with Rena and John’s, gave me hope that one day I might have the same thing.
By Christmas Eve, all of the presents were wrapped and the pile took up more than half of the large room! We girls thoroughly enjoyed the look on Sean’s face when he opened his gift. He tried on the robe immediately and raved about how comfortable it was. In fact, he wore it all morning as he played carols on the piano, and for most of the rest of the day.
Amid the chaos of opening presents, I watched Jim quietly give Kathleen her Christmas gift, a silver necklace with an eagle pendant. After he closed the clasp around her neck, she never took off that necklace, not even to bathe.
As we spent time giving and sharing that joyous Christmas morning, I felt a deep sense of contentment —an unfamiliar feeling, to be sure. That day was probably the happiest I’d ever experienced during my entire life. My eyes were opening up wider to the outside world that had been hidden from my view.