All I Want for Christmas is an Index Card

It’s Christmas Eve, and the presents are wrapped and piled up beneath the tree.

The stockings are hung by the chimney with care, a few of them already stuffed with goodies and trinkets, most of which have probably been made in China.

My credit card is full, too, of charges from weeks of spending on gifts. I always overspend my budget at Christmastime, and this year is no exception. The presents, the gift cards, the dinners out. 

Spend, spend, spend.

I feel blessed that though I am now semi-retired, I have the money to be able to splurge on the people who mean the most to me. Still, I can’t help but think that the whole thing is kind of nuts. In twenty or thirty years, will my kids remember any of the gifts that I give them this year?

Likely not. What they will remember is the time we spent together. Hugs I gave them. Words I spoke to them. It’s the simple things that endure the test of time, and the simple things cost very little or nothing at all.

I think of my dear grandmother, who’s been gone close to twenty-five years now.  

Gram was a widow for half her life. She never owned a car and walked everywhere she went. To make ends meet for the family, she sewed hems in the back room and worked for tips at a local deli. “Avis,” her customers called her, because Gram always tried harder and had a cheery smile for everyone she served.

Baker Gram

What did Gram give every year at Christmas to her twenty-five grandchildren?

Index cards.

That’s right. Gram was an amazing baker. To step into her kitchen when she was baking was as close to heaven as a kid could get on earth. Her pies, her cookies, her German applesauce cake. God, I loved that applesauce cake.

Being that she had no money, every year at Christmas she would give each of her grandchildren two index cards entitling us to a future baked good of our choice from her loving kitchen. We could cash in those cards whenever we wanted.

She did the same thing for our birthdays. I invariably cashed in my cards for one of her applesauce cakes. It was the best Christmas present I could ask for from her, because it came from her love and her talents.

My other grandmother did not hand out index cards. Her gifts to me were usually old books of poetry from her school years, marked up with her handwritten notes. Nana was a lettered woman who appreciated art and writing. I suppose that’s where my literary instincts come from.

I remember visiting Nana at her little apartment where we would sit and talk about her years growing up in Philadelphia. She would bring out a plate filled with her handmade spiced wafers and a bowl of sherbert.

Nana wasn’t as much of a baker as Gram, but she made great spiced wafer cookies. I loved dipping them into the sherbert.  

I remember, as well, all the baking that my mother did at Christmas. She would spend basically the entire month of December baking cookies of all different types, filling stacks of cookie tins to be handed out as Christmas gifts to her kids, grandkids, relatives and friends.

I especially loved Mom's glazed cinnamon buns made in the shape of a Christmas cane. Each of us kids went home with one of those buns every Christmas Day to slice up and dip in our morning tea or coffee.

Yum.

These are the things I remember about my past Christmases. All the gifts bought from a store are all long gone—gone from my closet, gone from my memory banks. Gone, gone, gone.

But the memories of those index cards from my Gram, the baked goods from her and my mother, the books of poetry from my Nana—these will be with me until my dying day, filling me with Christmas joy and goodness.

In the end, it’s not the size or cost of the gifts we give that matters. It’s the love that comes along with them.

May your holiday be filled with the simple gifts of love that last forever. God bless us, everyone!