The Christmas Sweater Read online

  My bike.

  Two

  It was Christmas Eve, and, as usual, Mom was at work. She was a cook at the local high school, but she always picked up an extra job or two at the mall around the holidays.

  I was home from school by myself, which always made Mom anxious. She hated leaving me alone. Not because I couldn’t take care of myself, but because she knew that I was way too much like my mischievous grandfather—who happened to be the inventor of the very pre-Christmas tradition that I was about to embark on: Operation Sneak Preview.

  One Christmas Eve, a few years ago, Grandpa and I found ourselves alone. My father was still at the bakery finishing up the croissants and cakes that would soon elicit “oohs” and “ahhs” at dinner tables all across town. My mom and grandma had gone to church. Normally my grandpa and I would’ve been dragged along, but Christmas was on a Monday that year, and somehow he had persuaded them that tomorrow’s Christmas service should count for both days. I had a lot to learn from him.

  “You want to play cards, Eddie?” Grandpa asked as soon as the front door clicked shut.

  Oh boy, here we go again, I thought.

  Grandpa loved playing cards. No, I take that back, he loved winning at cards. And he always won. In fact, he won so often that it had become somewhat of an unwritten family rule that you never, ever, at any cost, agreed to play cards with him. It was like feeding a wild animal: It might seem like a good idea at first, but you always regretted it later.

  I used to believe that Grandpa won at cards because he was really good, but that year I was old enough to know better. He won because he cheated. Perhaps “cheated” isn’t the right word; Grandpa had a system. Much like counting cards at a blackjack table, his methods weren’t necessarily illegal, but he didn’t advertise them either.

  Whenever we played, he concentrated more on figuring out the holes in his system than on actually beating me—though that never posed much of a problem either. I’d play a card and he’d pick it up and put it back in my hand and say, “Nope. You don’t want to play that card.” At first I thought he was just being helpful, but later I realized that it wasn’t about the kill for him. It was about the thrill of the chase. For Grandpa, playing cards with me was like going on a big-game hunt at the zoo—there was no real sport involved. I never really felt like I was playing cards with Grandpa so much as I was his test subject.

  I always figured that he used the practice rounds with me to refine his system so that he could win his weekly card game with friends, but I never asked and he never told me.

  “You’re sure you don’t want to play?” he repeated.

  “Sorry, Grandpa. Maybe later.”

  “Suit yourself. But I’m feeling pretty vulnerable today. I think you might have a real shot at beating me.” Grandpa was a really good liar. “But if you’re sure you don’t want to play cards…” His voice lowered as he got that “I’m more of a kid than you are” glint in his eyes. “Maybe I can think of something else for us to do.”

  “What?” I asked, which really meant “I’m in!” Grandpa had a knack for getting us into various levels of trouble, and I loved every second of it. His “ideas” were almost always code word for an elaborate plot he’d spent weeks dreaming up. As evidenced by his secret card-counting system, Grandpa was a big fan of finding the gray area between the letter of the law and the spirit of it.

  “Follow me,” he said, the playful edge in his voice now completely gone. Grandpa took his schemes very seriously. Whenever he and I embarked on a mission, no matter how absurd it was, we tried as hard as possible to get away with it. On the rare occasions when we did get caught, he would skillfully employ an extraordinarily complex, time-tested strategy: Deny, deny, deny. Surprisingly, it worked most of the time because adults simply didn’t want to believe a grown man would actually do the things he did.

  A great example occurred two summers earlier, when a troublemaking teenager stayed with his aunt, who lived across the street from my grandparents. The demon kid would stay up late screaming and hollering, vandalizing mailboxes, and generally trying to make life miserable for everyone in the usually quiet neighborhood.

  His favorite activity took place after dark, when he would set up a wall of rocks across the country road that wound its way through the neighborhood. Placed right at the crest of a small hill, the wall was invisible to cars coming from either direction. It wasn’t high—just a few inches in most places—but that was enough to make the unlucky cars that hit it blow out a tire, lose a muffler, or worse.

  The first few times it happened, the neighbors called the police. But that did little good, because no one actually caught the kid with the rocks. After a while most people just kept quiet and counted down the days until the unwelcome visitor would leave. But not Grandpa.

  A few days after the first rock wall incident, he began plotting. He observed that every night, after the mayhem was over, the kid would leave his football on his aunt’s front porch. The next morning, while Grandpa was eating breakfast, he would watch as the kid would run outside barefoot and kick his ball into the yard as hard as he could. That routine gave my grandpa a simple, yet completely diabolical, idea.

  One night, while the rest of the neighborhood slept, Grandpa took the football from the porch and brought it into his workshop. He carefully slit it open and filled it with the same rocks and stones the kid had used to make his walls. Then he sealed it back up and returned it to the porch.

  I don’t know exactly what happened after that, but I do know that the kid had a cast on his foot the next afternoon and the neighborhood never heard another peep out of him.

  No one ever knew my grandpa was responsible.

  While I never knew when he’d pulled another prank, I always figured that something had happened when he provided me with an alibi for no apparent reason. During a walk to the barn or a trip into town he’d turn to me and say something cryptic like, “By the way, Eddie, if anyone asks, you and I were at the feed store last night around six.” I’d smile and never have to ask why.

  The only two people who would ever call him on his schemes were my mother and my grandma. They knew that Grandpa was the only one who would ever go through all the trouble of flawlessly filling a football with rocks just to teach someone a lesson. But he didn’t cave easily. When it became clear that his denials would not stand up, he would say, “Eddie might have been slightly involved in something like that.”

  While it might sound like he was simply shifting the blame to me, that’s only part of the story. The real reason Grandpa loved to use that defense is that his name was Edward too. When he said “Eddie did it,” people would naturally assume that he meant me, and he could still feel good for not technically lying. Fortunately anyone who really knew my grandpa wasn’t fooled, so I never got in trouble.

  Now, back in the farmhouse, in the early stages of carrying out yet another undercover mission, Grandpa walked with a purpose. I did the best I could to keep up, but my short legs had to take two steps for every one of his long, graceful strides. We didn’t stop until we were standing in front of the guest bedroom closet. Without a word, Grandpa pulled open the closet door and reached one of his long arms into the back corner, retrieving a wrapped present. I was speechless.

  “First thing a Christmas aficionado needs to learn,” he said firmly, “is that the good presents never go under the tree until Christmas morning.”

  My eyes grew wide as his arm dashed back behind the clothes hamper and another present, this one slightly larger than the first, materialized. “Ooh, Grandma’s getting sly,” he snickered, clearly proud of himself. Four gifts later he was done fishing. “Okay, Eddie, now hold this one up to your ear. What do you think it is?”

  I took the box, careful not to rip the wrapping paper or crush the bow. The tag on the front said, “To Grandpa, From Grandma.” I held it up to my ear, unsure of exactly what I was supposed to be listening for. “Hmm…” I pretended to be weighing various options in my head, t
hough the truth was I didn’t even have a guess. “I don’t know. I don’t really hear much.”

  “Let me have a shot,” he said, barely able to control his excitement.

  I handed the box to him and he put it against the side of his head. He closed his eyes, shook it lightly, paused, then announced his verdict: “It’s a winter coat. Brown.”

  “Really?” I was shocked. “How do you know?”

  “I can hear it. Now hand me that one.”

  I picked up a rectangular box, put it in his oversized hands, and watched as he repeated the same process: Listen, shake, pause, verdict. “This is a curling iron. One of the fancy ones that automatically turns itself off.”

  I was stunned. Not about the curling iron, but at hearing how sure Grandpa was about it. There wasn’t an ounce of doubt in his voice.

  He asked me for the other two presents and repeated the now familiar routine. I put the curling iron and coat box to my ear as he worked, trying to hear something, anything, but they were both silent.

  Grandpa sat on the floor next to a present he’d decided was a new teapot for my mom. “Come here, Eddie, and sit next to me for a second. I want to teach you something. There is an art to Christmas.” He smiled, magic dancing in his eyes. “Some might say what I am about to show you is a dark art, but I prefer to think of it more as green and red.”

  I slid over next to him.

  “I believe it’s time that you finally understand the truth about the magic of Christmas.”

  “Grandpa, I already know. I’m not a little kid anymore.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. The magic itself is real, but sometimes it needs to be ‘helped’ along a bit. And that’s what I am…‘a helper.’ It’s like your dad’s bread. The yeast and flour may rise on their own, but nothing happens unless your dad puts it in the oven. That’s me. I’m like a Christmas-present oven.” This was my grandfather at his very best.

  Without waiting to see if I understood his cryptic analogy, he picked up the square present, turned it over, and exhaled gently at the seam where a single piece of tape held the paper flap shut. The tape’s surface fogged up from the humidity of his breath. He then worked gently at the corner of the tape with his fingernail until he was satisfied that he could peel it away without ripping the paper. The flap opened flawlessly.

  My eyes must’ve been as big as bike wheels as I watched what happened next: Grandpa put the gift on the carpet, reached his hand in through the open flap and gently slid the box out. Then he handed it to me. “Open it,” he said. “But be careful.”

  I pulled the top open, removed the red tissue paper, and found the present—a ceramic, oriental teapot with four small cups. Just what my mother wanted and just what my grandpa had predicted, though it was now obvious that it hadn’t been a prediction so much as a fact.

  We moved on to the other gifts. Some had multiple pieces of tape, which required patience; my grandpa reminded me that that was a virtue. Others were wrapped so tightly that you had to turn them upside down to get the box out. One by one, we unwrapped and rewrapped them all. (I later learned that by the time Christmas rolled around, my grandfather had opened all of his gifts at least three times.) After we finished, he carefully returned each present to its original hiding place, and we went downstairs.

  Little did I know that we weren’t even close to being done.

  Underneath the Christmas tree, there was a treasure trove of wrapped gifts to explore. We opened them all. It didn’t matter who they were to, or who they were from. We opened them, talked about them, and sometimes even played with them. Then we sealed them all up and carefully placed them back under the tree, exactly how we’d found them.

  Grandpa swore me to secrecy, but he didn’t need to. I knew that Operation Sneak Preview would provide Christmas magic for years to come, and I wasn’t about to blow it. My grandfather might have been the master, but just as my father had learned how to bake, I quickly became my grandfather’s very skilled apprentice.

  With my mom still at work for at least another couple of hours, I had plenty of time to execute this year’s “operation.”

  Mom and I had been in a continual, although unspoken, game of cat and mouse for the last few Christmases. She’d find a great hiding spot and I’d find her great hiding spot. She’d find a better spot and I’d find that one too. Maybe I hadn’t been as skilled as I’d thought in regards to putting the presents back exactly how I’d found them, because she’d always seemed to know when her hiding places had been compromised.

  This year, as I started searching the floor of her bedroom closet, I was determined not to leave the slightest trace. After all, I was twelve now and sure that I could finally pull off the “operation” as well as Grandpa.

  As my hand felt into the back corner of the closet, I realized that I was secretly hoping I wouldn’t find a present there. If my present could fit in a closet, then there was no way it could be a bike, and that was the only gift I wanted that year. What I was hoping to find was a receipt—and I knew Mom would be smart enough to hide that too.

  My hands carefully searched every nook and cranny of the closet floor. And then I felt it. A box. Small. Unwrapped. “Ooh, Mom’s slipping,” I laughed to myself as I pulled the box out from the darkness. A thin layer of dust coated the top. How had I missed this the last few years?

  I pulled the top off gently, careful not to leave fingerprints in the dust just in case this was an elaborate trap set by my mother. As I pushed the tissue paper out of the way, I realized immediately that it was not. The item inside was instantly familiar. It was my dad’s favorite old Hamilton watch. A faint hint of his Old Spice cologne still resonated from the band.

  Without warning, my mind flashed to an image of the last time I saw that watch. It was about four years ago, right after a morning snowstorm had delayed the start of school. It was a Monday, and the bakery was closed. Dad was home, hunched over in front of me as he secured clear plastic bread bags over my shoes. My friends had real winter boots, but my father said they were a waste of money since we had so many free bread bags around the house that could do the job just as well. That should have been a clue that we weren’t exactly the Rockefellers—but it made sense to me at the time.

  As he worked a rubber band over my shoes to fasten the bag tightly onto my skinny calves, his shirtsleeve pulled up, revealing the shiny Hamilton watch. I stared at the time, realizing that I was now seriously late for school and dreading the prospect of hurrying over slushy snow with slippery plastic bags on my feet. They might have kept the water out, but they weren’t known for their traction.

  “Dad, I’ve really got to go. I’m gonna be late,” I’d insisted, hoping that he’d give up on the homemade waterproofing and drive me instead.

  “Sorry, Eddie, I’d rather you be late than have to sit through school with cold, wet feet. I just need another second.”

  I’d stared at the Hamilton, watching the small second hand go round and round, each revolution marking how much faster I would have to run to make it on time.

  I’d also thought about how ironic it was that my dad was a baker and though we had plenty of bread bags, we never had any bread in the house.

  “Eddie,” he would say to me, “if I bring all my bread home for us to eat, then what am I supposed to sell?”

  It was a funny line, but I knew it was an excuse. The truth was that after a long day at work, my parents would rush to close up and simply forget to bring home the bread they had been staring at all day. My mother thought it was hilarious. She used to joke that the cobbler’s son never had any shoes to wear and the butcher’s son never had any steak to eat, so we were even, but I never found it that funny.

  I had gotten so accustomed to not having bread at home that I once dumped an entire jar of peanut butter into a bowl and started eating it with a spoon. My mother came into the kitchen and did a double take.

  “What the heck are you doing?” she asked, genuinely shocked to see the heapi
ng spoonfuls I was shoveling into my mouth.

  “What do you mean?” I answered as best I could, considering the fact that I was unable to fully open my mouth. “We have no bread.”

  “That’s no excuse for you to eat like an animal. Now put that away.”

  I snuck a couple more spoonfuls after she left, then scooped the rest of it back into the jar. Fortunately Mom had only chastised me about peanut-butter eating, so other condiments were still fair game. For the next few weeks I enjoyed bowls full of Marshmallow Fluff, strawberry jam, and even whipped cream. Then I tried mayonnaise; with that, my breadless-condiment-sampling experiment officially came to a disgusting end.

  Dad finally finished tying on my bread-bag boots, and I rushed through the front door into the cold. Being late for school gave me a great excuse to run, but my real intention was to get out of sight as fast as possible so I could rip the stupid bags off my feet. I once made the mistake of showing up at school with them on, and it took months before my friends stopped making fun of me. “Bread Bag Ed” was my first nickname, but that quickly turned into the far more memorable “Breaddie Eddie.” It was spring before everyone forgot the incident. I wasn’t eager to help them remember.

  The Hamilton’s second hand, which had once symbolized how badly I’d wanted to flee from my father that snowy winter’s day, now sat there idly, mocking me. I wished I hadn’t run so quickly to school that day. Time didn’t seem to matter anymore.

  I carefully put the watch back into its box, replaced the tissue paper, then returned it to its original resting place. I wondered how such a powerful memory of my father could be stored in a dark and lonely closet, but it seemed fitting.

  Before moving on to more inventive hiding spots, I decided to check under the obvious one: my mother’s bed. It was a long shot, but I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if my gift was that close and I missed it.