The Best Christmas Ever

by Jill MacGregor

I am seven.

I am finally getting to grow my hair out and occasionally, my mother who has fine, stick straight hair, will give my very wavy hair a perm. Vicarious Lilt Permanent Wave…

I don’t know why either.

My dad takes me to the Planetarium on what feels like a regular basis and I like it. I love it when they turn out the lights and its pitch dark and the voice and the stars come on at the same time. It doesn’t make me feel small or insignificant. It makes me feel a part of something big that I don’t understand.

We have fun, my parents and me. In my spare time, I am trying to learn how to swear. I am not very good at it and swear like someone who is just learning English– but I seem to always get caught when swearing (with poor syntax and improper conjugation) at one of the neighborhood boys.

I have mastered riding my bike without training wheels and have stopped careening into the fins of our Oldsmobile (ow) and the mailbox (ow, but a smaller one).

We live in Peoria, Il. We will live here just short of two years. We will live here just long enough to complete a very important task. And if you don’t believe that everything happens for a reason, I hope this will change your mind. And if it doesn’t change your mind…I think you might be visited by three ghosts tonight.

I regularly defend my friend Wee. His name is really Lee but he has a wittle wisp and it takes me a long time to get that his name is Lee, not Wee, and what a lisp really is. He is smaller and gets picked on and I don’t mind pushing a bully. I am not a delicate little girl.

I have been an only child for seven years. And one day in July 1969, just a few weeks before Neil Armstrong is the first man to walk on the moon, my parents tell me I am going to have a little brother…at the end of the week.

Hmmm.

Jack, my brother. I don’t know if I’d say I was excited about the idea of having a brother but I was definitely curious. If my parents had said we were getting a puppy, I would have been excited. We all visited the adoption agency in our Sunday best and were led to a sunny room with a white rocking chair. And we meet Jack. He is days old and has that tiny old man look that newborns often have. We are told that Jack has the same birthday as my mom and we all quietly recognize this as special.

We don’t quite know how to act because our excitement is growing with every minute we spend with our new, old man, Jack. We could laugh hysterically or cry or sit staring in quiet amazement that here we are…HERE WE ARE, a very different family than we were 5 minutes ago. Everything was different yet at the same time it was as if we’d always been this family of four and all previous moments in our non-Jack, threesome world had disappeared and been swiftly replaced by moments that we’d always shared with Jack.

We all settled in.

My brother, Jack. Someone I don’t know gave him that big nose and that even bigger brain. He’s all MacGregor with his weird sense of humor, highly functional made up language, love of blowing up fireworks in near illegal and always dangerous ways. All MacGregor.

But then he’s also very, “I don’t get your art. It doesn’t look like anything. Maybe if you painted a tree.” (I do abstracts.) And very “I don’t understand the movie. I’m going to Wikipedia it.” These things crack me up.

Fast forward to December. My Dad informs me that my Aunt Margaret and her family are going to spend Christmas with us. Aunt Margaret is my Dad’s sister. Her family includes Uncle Don (never met him) and my cousins Greg, Mark, Donna and Lori (never met them, either). These cousins are all older than me. There are 6 people coming to stay with us in our 3 bedroom duplex. We were being invaded and the thought was thrilling.

So, 6 of them and 4 of us.

Family can just happen in a moment, whether you’re genetically linked or not. The main thing is that everyone agrees, “Yes, this is what we are. Our tribe. Our strange little tribe.” I remember this Christmas so fondly because there was a thrill in not being the oldest…I did not have to be as responsible as the others and I liked that. And there was so much funny. The jokes went back and forth at a crazy speed and although my kid brain could only observe and not fully participate in the zingers, I knew this was a skill I wanted to develop. I wanted to play like this!

In this little three bedroom duplex, there were suddenly 10 people. Plus a Christmas tree that was so big (obviously a representation of the excitement everyone was feeling) that it wouldn’t fit in the house. We had to saw off the top two feet and it was still so large for the room that the lower branches were flush with the floor. We had an obese Christmas tree. Your Christmas tree is so fat—how fat is it?!—that when it sits around the house…its really sits around the house. Really—we couldn’t put presents under the tree because there was NO under the tree. There was tree adjacent seating for all presents. I think we had to cut some of the limbs off in the back so that it didn’t take up half the room.

But the tree was a symbol. A symbol of our excitement at being together. Our swelling, uncontainable, irrepressible excitement that we were all under the same roof in a space far too small to contain us and therefore there just may be some bursting at the seams. We felt like an army, our numbers had grown so quickly overnight. We were together—some of us for the first times in our lives. And then there was this little baby—what kind of lottery did we win?

We were lucky and we knew it. It made us loud. It made the Christmas tree take up half the room. It was such a great Christmas, all stuffed in that duplex with the gia-nourmous Christmas tree like a sausage fixing to burst its casing, our excitement and energy vibrating the walls.

It was so different than I was used to and I liked it.

Because of our overstuffed house, people slept were they fell. My cousin Lori was (and still is) three years older than I am. And suddenly she was an older sister and I was a younger sister—I think we both enjoyed the change of roles. When you are 7 and she is 10, those 3 years become as vast and unconnected as if we were different dialects of the same language. As we lay in the dark on our bed of fluffy blankets, we decided Christmas was a perfect time for scary stories. This is when my cousin Lori told me the story of the china doll that came to life at night and sawed the head off of its current owner with its crazy big fingernail. As she whispered the story in the dark, I saw that doll with its unblinking eyes and frozen smile coming at me with a speed that was never fast and never slow yet always gaining on me…I am forever put off by those dolls now. Shiver…blah…

It is Christmas morning and we have all slept in the same house as if we attended a party that never ended. We have opened our presents and now lay amidst the rubble of paper and bows and thank you’s and I felt full. Full in the best way imaginable—as if having everyone to our house was the perfect meal and I had eaten the exact amount to be full but not too full. Having everyone together, in my mind, we became the family that wouldn’t stop growing—first Jack and now all these raucous cousins—and it was, well ,it was perfect.

Jack, in his special Christmas pajamas—I can still see them. The pajamas were red and white with a big Christmas mouse on them and a little Santa hat that Jack could wear on his very bald head. He was no longer the tiny baby we had brought home 6 months ago, in fact, that day wasn’t even in my memory. He had just always been with us, just like these new cousins of mine, only far away, and we just hadn’t met yet.

It only takes a moment to love a child. In the snap of your fingers, everything is different, as if that love has been in you and growing for as long as you’ve been alive.

This was the first Christmas I understood how big family could be, how loud, how crowded, how different—and how inclusive all those things were. We were lucky. We were lucky that we just happened to live in Peoria at the same time when Jack was born and that the state adoption agency, who had said no for so many years to my a little bit older, already had one child parents, finally, one day, just said yes. Really…just said yes– and we don’t know why after so many no’s. Yes, to a family and a mother who happened to have the same birthday as her new, little boy.

The next place we moved to was West Lafayette, IN, home of Purdue University. Neil Armstrong graduated from Purdue. I’m just saying…

No, you shut up.

Don’t mention coincidence to me. Can I make you understand? Walking on the moon or a new little brother…these were things that happened against all odds and changed everything from that day forward.