A few blocks away from my family's home in Livermore, California, stands a modest gray-blue house with cream trim. I am always a little surprised when I walk by that house during the day. It seems strangely out of context in the brilliant afternoon sunlight, like a white poinsettia in a vase of daffodils. Sometimes as I wander past, I feel a cool breeze across my face, or hear a quiet swell of laughter from a nearby yard, and for an instant I view the structure through the lens of memory.
I see the house as it appeared during the frigid winter nights of my youth-- bedecked with strings of colored lights which twine across the porch rails and into the branches of nearby bushes. On the porch, hundreds of miniature Christmas lights glisten white against the dark blue sky of a wooden landscape, painted in the foreground with the buildings and spires of Bethlehem. Three camel riders are silhouetted on the left, gazing earnestly into the darkness in search of their King. Warm shadows move behind the drawn curtains of the front window, interspersed with flickering hues of color and the yellow glow of candlelight.
On December 13, 1987, my family pulled up in front of the house in our big, red and white van and snuck onto the porch with as much silence as two adults can impose on five exuberant children. We rang the doorbell and huddled on the porch in breathless excitement, watching our breath make fog in the air. After a few moments the door swung open and the family burst into enthusiastic song.
On the first day of Christmas
my friends brought to me
A candy cane in a fir tree!
On the last line we produced from hiding the tree; an inverted ice cream cone covered with green frosting. M&M s, gumdrops, and cookie sprinkles served as tree ornaments, and a miniature candy cane was wedged through a hole cut in the tip.
Mr. and Mrs. O'Brion, an elderly couple my family had known for several years, stood side by side in the doorway. They swung the screen door wide to accept their candy tree and beckoned my family and me inside as we moved into an off-key rendition of It s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.
The O'Brions living room seemed to emanate love. Flickering candles and Christmas lights cast a warm glow across the cream and beige furnishings. The smell of cookies and home-made fudge filled the air. Christmas carols played softly in the background, accompanied by the soft buzz of conversation and the rippling flow of laughter. I came back to the O'Brions home with my family twelve times that December, and each night I did I saw new people in the house.
This was the O'Brions Christmas tradition, you see. Each December they filled their home with warmth and love, and invited the public in to share it. Mrs. O'Brion baked plates full of fudge and cookies. Her husband and children helped her hang lights and tinsel streamers all through the house and across the back patio, and they welcomed anyone who cared to visit. Friends, neighbors, rowdy girl scout troops and complete strangers; all were welcome in the O'Brions' pocket of winter warmth. Toward Christmas, the street in front of the gray-blue house was lined with the cars of idle passers-by who had heard of the home from friends. They wandered in for a quick peek and stayed for hours, talking with the O'Brions or admiring a lifetime s collection of ornaments and Christmas decorations. When they left, a little pocket of warmth went with them, a little piece of the O'Brions love. Where most families view the Holiday season as a private time, the O'Brions chose to share their Christmas with the world, and I think the world was better for it.
After delivering the Candy Cane in a Fir Tree to the O'Brions and chatting with them for a few minutes, my parents excused us and we departed to visit two other families on our caroling list. But the next night we were back to sing another modified verse of The Twelve Days of Christmas and to deliver two handmade Christmas tree ornaments, along with smiles and good cheer. Each year my family selects two or three families to carol in this fashion, returning each night with another verse of the song and another gift. The caroling was always fun for my family, but there was a somber, almost tragic aspect to the singing when we arrived each evening at the O'Brions doorstep.
Mrs. O'Brion was dying.
Her doctors had diagnosed her with cancer several months before and had warned her that she probably would not live past November. But Mrs. O'Brion, dear soul, was determined to see another Christmas, and to share it with others as she had always done. She was too weak physically to decorate the house and prepare refreshments as she had in past years, but she directed her husband and children from her wheelchair and continued to greet visitors at the door when her health permitted.
We watched Mrs. O'Brion s condition grow worse over the twelve evenings we sang on her porch. When she was well enough, she met us at the door to hear our singing, unshed tears glistening in her eyes. After the singing was done my parents would stay in the living room to speak with the O'Brions as the children scattered throughout the house to admire the decorations and feast on the cookies and candy canes. Perhaps it sounds callous, but death and the struggles of mortality mean little to a ten-year-old. I hardly saw Mrs. O'Brion as a person. She was just another item belonging to the fabulous Christmas house, a little frightening in her wheelchair and with oxygen tubes running across her arm and face. I avoided her when possible and admired instead the Holiday splendor of her home.
A gigantic fir, at least five feet in diameter, dominated the far corner of the O'Brions' living room. White doves, beaded icicles and tinsel streamers adorned its branches, but far more fascinating to me at the time was the carefully orchestrated snowscape which spread beneath the boughs. Miniature church houses were placed among hills and valleys of artificial snow. Spaced among them stood an entire populace of tiny dolls and wooden figurines, all bundled up in coats and mittens and going about their holiday activities. In one section a group of dolls stood in a semi-circle, choir books glued to their hands, singing to a crowd of listeners. In another area wooden ice skaters glided across the surface of an oval mirror nestled among the snowflakes.
Any one of the dolls alone would not have interested me, but taken together as a miniature society, they were enthralling. I spent most of my time in the O'Brions' house crouched beside that tree, making up lives for the little people in the snow. This boy and girl skating together were going to be married soon in the little church across the way. That little group near the edge of the snow was a family headed home after finishing their Christmas shopping. In my mind, each figurine was connected to all the others through a complex web of interrelationships. I could not imagine the dolls as isolated individuals. Each one was a piece of a complex community.
Two nights before Christmas Mrs. O'Brion called me over to where she sat in her wheelchair, bathed in the warm glow of a nearby candle. On her lap she held an old paper bag. Slowly she opened it and withdrew a Japanese doll nearly two feet high. She was the most beautiful doll I d ever seen, dressed in a red jacket and green skirt, all of silk and adorned with jewels and glass beads. Her black hair was bound up on top of her head, with one ponytail hanging down her back. A smile creased Mrs. O'Brion's pale and wrinkled face as she placed the doll in my hands. I stared at it in stunned amazement.
What had I done to deserve such a treasure? I arrived each night only to sing off-key and eat Mrs. O'Brion's cookies, yet something in my tiny acts of kindness had stirred this wondrous gratitude. Somehow, through my half-felt offerings of love, I had become important to Mrs. O'Brion. Even more startling, I realized that her single gift to me created a change in my own emotions. Mrs. O'Brion suddenly became far more than just that woman who made the cookies. She became a living, breathing individual to me, someone kind and loving, who cared enough to give me such a beautiful gift. A bond had been forged between us.
Clutching the doll close to my chest, I stammered my thanks, gazing in awe at this woman who I had somehow never noticed before. How had I missed the noble grace in her eyes, the sweet love so overflowing that she felt compelled to share it with strangers each year by opening her home to them? I admired the doll for the rest of my family s stay that evening. As we left I gave Mrs. O'Brion a hug and thanked her a second time.
I never saw Mrs. O'Brion again. The next night she was too ill to leave her room. She died before New Year s Day.
The doll she had given me received an honored place on the piano in our living room. I named her Laia To Shang, more because it sounded beautiful than because I thought it was really a Japanese name. On a visit to the O'Brions' house a few days after Christmas, my mother learned that Mrs. O'Brion had once owned three such dolls. Two of them had been given to Mrs. O'Brion's two daughters. This last, her favorite, had remained at the head of her bed for years. I spent many hours gazing at Laia, admiring the folds of her gown and the jeweled streamers down her hair until I had practically memorized them. Every time I looked at her, I saw Mrs. O'Brion.
Laia is gone now, consumed by an electrical fire that reduced our living room to a blackened shell. As pained as I am by her loss, I know that she was not the most valuable aspect of the gift Mrs. O'Brion gave me. Laia was an avenue, a means through which Mrs. O'Brion expressed her love and forged an enduring bond between myself and her.
I realize now that there is a powerful connection between Laia, and the beautiful decorations which hung in the O'Brions' home, and the handmade gifts that my family gives away when we go Christmas caroling each December. I think of the figurines beneath the giant fir tree, imaginary lives bound together by the silken cords of relationships, and I see that the community of real people around me is no different. The thoughtful overtures we make, the little gifts of love and friendship that we share, are the fragile strands which unite us.
In my mind I envision sparkling threads shooting from a single source and arcing through the air in random directions. Where the tip of each strand touches, a dozen more shoot up, each new strand in turn sparking off another flurry of activity, until the air is glistening with the motion of the threads, until the world is so tightly bound together with caring that the most powerful forces of nature cannot tear one person from the others.
Mrs. O'Brion helped to build this network of service. Everyone who entered her home felt the warmth of her love, and although her family did not have the heart to carry on the Christmas tradition without her, I know that I am not the only person who walks by that gray-blue house in the afternoon and thinks, Ah, yes, I remember. They are still alive, those tender strands which made me feel welcome in that house. There is a tiny spider inside me, now, which longs to leave silken threads behind it wherever it goes, tying the pieces of the humanity together. That spider is Mrs. O'Brion's greatest gift to me, more valuable even than the Japanese doll which stood on our piano for so many years.
A friendly smile and hello, a thoughtful note, cookies left on a pillow... all of these make up the web of kindness which links us to each other and, through each other, to the vast landscape of interconnectedness which is human society. The greatest bonds are not those few massive cables of incredible service, but rather the thousands upon thousands of tiny gossamer threads which tie us all to each other in a tapestry which grows daily more complicated and beautiful.