NO PLACE LIKE HOME

Karen Wight

I’ve tried to be an imaginative Christmas elf this season. Finding

clever and original gifts is hard and takes a lot of time. I’ve traveled

outside my usual loop, and I’m proud of my obscure purchases.

I’ve shopped home boutiques to find unusual items that don’t have

“retail” written all over them. I’ve secretly shopped online, Christmas

Company, Ebay, weekends away without the kids, and I’ve listened for

nuggets of information from other elves.

And I’ve been successful. I feel like I reached the right balance of

not-too-much, not-too-little, fairly equitable distribution between the

kids. I have Christmas all wrapped up.

Well, not literally, which was my downfall.

As I’ve hoarded these gifts, I thought I’d found very covert hiding

places. We have a lot of storage space in the house and I’ve utilized all

of it. Forgotten closets, secret attic accesses, garage cupboards,

behind the boxes on the high shelf of the cleaning closet. Really good

hiding places.

I kept waiting for that infamous elementary school fund-raiser

wrapping paper to come in before I started the workshop and powered

through wrapping duties.

It didn’t occur to me that the “rats,” a.k.a. children, would be

scurrying around daily looking for their gifts in all the secret places.

Actually, that’s not fair. There’s really one large rat in the house.

Her name is Annie.

Now Annie is a busy 16-year-old rat. In fact, she’s rarely home.

Between school, sports and a very active social life, I don’t see as much

of her as I’d like. And when she’s home, I never see her scurry anywhere

except to the couch with a big bowl of ice cream. Lethargy, yes.

Scurrying, no.

So it came as a surprise to me a month or so ago when she announced,

“Hey Mom, I really like that ‘sumo’ T-shirt you’ve been hiding. I hope

it’s for me.”

I was crushed. That had been an item not on her “wish list” and was

going to be a complete surprise. Darn her. “And,” she continued, “I don’t

really like those sunglasses.”

“Well good,” I said, “because they’re not for you. They’re for your

cousin Stephanie.”

In a gullible frenzy, I felt like I needed to have another “surprise”

for her. So I went online and found her favorite thongs (footwear, just

to be clear), which were on sale through J. Crew and the shipping was

free. Clever me, I ordered two pair and a bathing suit.

About a week later, she came home for lunch and the mailman rang the

doorbell. Annie answered. The mailman said, “You’d better check this

package to make sure everything is in one piece. It was ripped in the

mail.”

So, on the spot, Annie opens the big envelope and sees her flip-flops

and bathing suit. “Thanks,” she says to the postman and brings the

contents into the kitchen to show me. “Great suit, Mom. Thanks.” Foiled

again.

So I guess there will be few, if any surprises for my big girl under

the tree, and no, Annie, there will not be a car in the driveway or a

cell phone in the stocking.

I was lamenting this to my mother the other day, and she told me that

in her 71 years, she has never received a Christmas gift that she has not

surreptitiously opened and then resealed and placed back under the tree.

I couldn’t believe this. My mother started this December deception as a

child and carried through her entire adult life.

Shaking, weighing, trying to sneak a peek was not good enough. She

would just get up in the middle of the night, unwrap all of her packages

and then carefully re-wrap them in the shroud of darkness.

She laughed. I laughed. It’s clearly a genetic flaw. Annie is just

more open about it. I was complaining to one of her friends this week

about Annie’s ability to sniff out a present, and how she just blatantly

tells me what she’s found.

“That’s part of her strategy,” said the friend. “She knows you will

keep buying her stuff if you think she knows everything she’s getting.”

The rat has beaten the elf.

I asked a few of Annie’s friends if they sneak around the house

looking for presents. Most of them had. And most of the parents are

apparently more clever than I am.

One girl told me that her parents don’t even put out any presents

until Christmas Eve. Her mom keeps everything out of the house until the

last minute. Another admitted that she has yet to find a single gift,

but she still keeps looking every day, certain that something will

eventually show up.

A genetically predisposed sneaky female teenager has outfoxed this

elf. The fact that she has “worked” me is the worst part.

I still have a few surprises in store though. I can’t elaborate;

she’ll figure it out.

Merry Christmas.

* KAREN WIGHT is a Newport Beach resident. Her column runs Sundays.