Spirit of Christmas

"Good morning, Mrs. Stewart. It's good to see you out. How're doin' today?"

"Oh, you know, Mr. Baxter. Each day just sort of nudges the one before it. It just all sort of goes on—a bit too long, if you ask me."

Clem Baxter watched Louise Stewart from 12A move arthritically down the walk between the two old, red-brick apartment houses facing each other. Clem had been the super for these buildings for nearly twenty years, and he knew most of the tenants by their apartment numbers, but he'd grown to know the names of those living in his own hall. Louise turned right when she got to Elm. The Shoprite was in that direction, and Clem saw that she was carrying her shopping bag. He tried to remember when she'd gone to shopping nearly every day and couldn't rightly pin it down. It seemed she was going more often now than when her Johnny was alive. But then maybe she'd been bringing groceries home when she was still working. That had been the two bad things that had happened to Mrs. Stewart since the summer. Her boy had finally died and she'd been retired from her job.

This would be her first Christmas without her boy and her job. Clem sure wished he could do something to cheer her up, but they'd cut his super hours and he was feeling the financial pinch too. Times were tough. Mrs. Johnson in 1GA had her time cut back on her too, and she was trying to raise three small children by herself. And then there was the young couple in 11B, the Wilcoxes—although their problem was that they were barely making it with both of them working and now she was pregnant and would be off for a while and then maybe couldn't go back full time. And that Jim Wilcox was so busy helping at the food bank, he was pretty worn out with the paying job he had on top of that.

Yep, times were tough, Clem thought as he moved back into the hall and entered his apartment, 11A. As he gathered up cleaning supplies to work on the vacant 12B, he heard the knock on the door. When he opened it, the deliveryman was already half way down the sidewalk back to Elm street. Looking down, Clem saw a small Christmas gift basket. The building owners did this every year—gave him a gift basket. He'd rather have a cash bonus, but it was sort of interesting to see what weird things he find in these baskets--including coupons and things like this lottery ticket.

"This lottery ticket," Clem thought. Why did he suddenly think of Mrs. Stewart? Maybe because it was for a Shoprite frozen turkey—advertised as somebody's New Year's Day meal.

To Clem this was fate. He chuckled that fate smiled on even those on the down and out like he and his neighbors. He scrounged around and came up with a stray envelope and printed "Merry Christmas" in a hand he hoped Mrs. Stewart wouldn't recognize, inserted the lottery ticket, hurried up the stairs, and slipped it under her door.

For three days, the lottery ticket dominated Louise Stewart's thoughts as nothing else had done since Johnny died the day after she'd received notice she was being retired. So taken had her thoughts been with the passing of her last reasons for living that when her old refrigerator died, she'd done no more than found a temporary fix of a countertop refrigerator from the Salvation Army store. The lottery ticket brought new, intriguing questions into her life. Who put it under her door and why? Who would give her a present at all? Everyone in her life was gone now. She was all alone.

But could she really say she was all alone when someone had given her a Christmas present—one that captured her attention for three days? The one question she didn't give much thought to—because nothing in life had encouraged her to consider winning a lottery—was what she'd do with the eighteen-pound turkey prize if she won it.

Thus, when she was struggling home on Christmas Eve from Shoprite with her eighteen-pound turkey prize, Louise wasn't considering what she was going to do with it when she had no freezer and not even a refrigerator large enough for it or an oven big enough to cook it in.

These realities did surface in her mind when she was standing at the foot of the stairs up to her floor in the apartment hallway and wondering if the turkey might take a turn in carrying her the last nearly vertical twelve feet. That's when she wondered how big a freezer Pam Wilcox in 11B had.

When Pam answered her door, three observations simultaneously struck Louise. She could see through to the kitchen, where there was a nice big refrigerator with freezer and, as a bonus, a stove with an oven that looked like it could hold an eighteen-pound turkey. And in the foreground was a young lady who looked like she was eleven months pregnant with triplets—a young lady who wasn't at work.

In a flash, Louise remembered that Pam's forced maternity leave had started two days earlier and that she and her husband were worried about finances now. The grief of Louise's own job loss and all that it had entailed welled up in her. She had intended only to ask if Pam had room in her freezer to hold the turkey until Louse could decide what to do with it, but that's not what she said when Pam opened the door. Instead, she said "Merry Christmas" and pressed the turkey into Pam's arms and turned and started climbing the stairs.

Pam stammered in surprise, unable to form her words, and Louise filled the gap with a decisive, "You two have a feast for New Year's, dear. You are going to need the strength very soon now."

She was through the door of 12A and standing and chuckling—or hyperventilating, she couldn't be sure which—while Pam was still standing in her doorway, flapping her jaw and feeling the cold in a peculiar place. "What an interesting Christmas present that was," Louise whispered before she took her two-day's worth of groceries into her kitchen.

"What's the matter, Jim?" Pam asked two days later as the two were sitting at the dinner table. "You've been glum for a week now. Christmas should be a time of joy, and we're about to have our own bundle of joy." For two days Pam had been avoiding saying much of anything to Jim. She was afraid of what might be worrying him so much. Second thoughts of fatherhood or deep worry about the loss of her income? It could be either or both, and neither was something she wanted to give voice to.

"It's because it's Christmas," he answered. "The cupboard is practically bare down at the food bank. There are going to be families without enough to eat for New Year's. And remember how I pledged that our big spending for Christmas was going to be helping the food bank? I just don't see now that—"

"Hold that thought for a moment, love," Pam said. She stood up and went to the refrigerator and opened the freezer door. She did so rather reluctantly. She'd looked forward to a special New Year's meal. But they would manage. She remembered how excited Jim had been when he'd come up with the idea of this special Christmas pledge he wanted to make and how relieved he'd been and the love he'd shown when she readily went along with the scheme. She knew how much the food bank effort meant to him—and how much he meant to her.

It had been a very nice present from Louise Stewart, one that had touched Pam deeply—so deeply that she hadn't found the right time to tell Jim about it yet.

The surprise in Jim's face when she plopped the eighteen-pound turkey on the table in front of him, not to mention and awe and love she saw in his eyes when she told him that could be their contribution to the food bank, was worth the most expensive Christmas present Pam could think of—and Pam gave a little prayer of thanksgiving for Louise Stewart's gift as she watched Jim march off to the food bank with the turkey in his hands.

As Jim Wilcox was arriving at the food bank and wondering who of the many client families they had that could make best use of the turkey, Sarah Johnson was leaving the basement apartment 1GA to make the first trip she had ever made to the food bank. She had been signed up for their services for several months now, but up to this time pride and the determination to handle her problems herself had kept her from making that trip to the food bank. But there had been one thing she really wanted to do this Christmas season, and it was growing almost too late to do it. Thus, she had swallowed her pride and asked Mrs. Stewart in 12A if she could sit for the children while she went on an errand, and Sarah had built up the courage to venture forth.

Jim Wilcox saw Sarah Johnson coming through the door of the food bank—slowly and hesitatingly—and he knew immediately where the turkey would go. He had been meaning to encourage her to come in; he knew the Johnsons were backsliding, and he'd even had thoughts to telling her that he'd bring a food basket to her before Christmas, even though this was not covered in the organization's rules. She had signed up, though, and whereas other client families had been receiving food aid, she'd hadn't done so yet.

The turkey wouldn't be above and beyond what she had a right to receive in services this Christmas season.

He saw her turn, indecisive, possibly to exit right after she entered, and he moved quickly forward and put his hand on her arm.

"Please, please, do come in Mrs. Johnson. We have something for you. You were on the books for something for a Christmas meal and you didn't come. We'll be pleased if you take a basket for New Year's. There's one right over here. I just have to put something else in it and it will be ready for you."

Sarah Johnson's eyes went big and watery as she saw Jim Wilcox struggle out of the back room with an eighteen-pound frozen turkey and plop it in a box with other staples for a holiday meal.

"But . . . but . . . Mr. Wilcox. It's so big. I don't think I—"

"Sure you can. I'm sure you can find folks to share your New Year's meal with you."

"Well, since you mention it," she said, her voice suddenly small, "my one wish for Christmas was to have a few others in for a meal this season. I'll take this—but only on condition that you and Mrs. Wilcox join my family for the New Year's Day meal."

"Pam and I? Why I don't know—"

"I was going to ask you anyway. Louise Stewart from upstairs and Mr. Baxter from across the hall from you have already said they'd come—although I didn't promise them a meal as fancy as this will fix. Please come. This was the one thing I was looking forward to for this season. We've all of us—on our hall at the apartments—have had a pretty rough year—but you are about to start a family, and I can tell you what a joy children are even if it's hard to provide for them. I thought we were all due to be able to share a bit of the spirit of Christmas."