Christmas morning, oh Christmas morning! Your freshness shames the springtime. Your crisp innocence, your unbounded hopefulness, your fullness, like a dear promise kept. Oh, if I could have all my Christmas mornings rolled up into a great red ball again, you could have all the years, you could keep them, all of them. And if my life was made of Christmas mornings, I'd have the life I always wanted.

Ah, to awaken as the world snores. To hear the house poised and expectant, cracking its floorboards like they were knuckles. I sit up. I am one essential sense—eyes wide, ears perked. Awake! My heart swells like the sea inside of me. And outside, along the streets and avenues, a great hush holds all of Brooklyn in its fond embrace.

I peek through the blinds and there, there is the snow. Soft and tender, graciously, compassionately absorbing the least crackle. Draped over the block on the nubs and pickets of the fences, upon the sleeping hedges, over the fat thighs of the sycamore outside my window, on the stoops and gardens, on sidewalk and street, over the cars, on top of my grandfather's mulberry tree like a mischievous giant who nothing and no one can gainsay, sprawling grandiosely across public and private property, king of the winter.

The fat sun came up smiling that Christmas day, flinging sparkles off the crystalline robe of snow. It might be the right kind of snowfall, I thought, I hoped. I toss away the covers. I swing my feet onto the cold floorboards, (the scatter-rug is rarely in the right spot). The heat isn't up yet. But before I get my slippers on the radiators start to clear their throats. I can smell the comfort of the coming heat already. Throwing open the window I scoop up snow from the sill, taste some, test some, and press some more into a ball.

Good packing, oh boy, oh boy, good packing, I mutter to myself, fiendishly.

I rear back and hurl one—side arm—at George Durand's fancy green Buick. A beaut: with a resounding thud it sticks to the back fender, creating a round white pattern like a bull's-eye. George, who lives to gnash his teeth at the state of the world, is going to be delightfully livid.

God, there was such good packing in those days!

Now I'm in the living room. And the lights on the tree are off. Somebody turned them off. I didn't. There on the coffee table is a glass of milk, half drunk, and the crumbs of my grandmother's formidable-sounding but wonderful-tasting "een-gart-a-debt."

What this might mean is too much for me to grapple with so early in the morning. There, under the tree, are piles and piles of presents. I'm as giddy as a kid tumbleweeding down a hill. I plug in the lights. The tree is magnificent. I yip like a cowboy and dive into the silvery joys of Christmas, pushing aside all my thoughts of who and where and when and why.

Under the tree I find everything I asked for—and more— just as there had always been throughout the years. Well, not everything I asked for—everything I wanted. I always asked for a goodly sack-full of things, trusting that Santa could tell which ones I really wanted.

All at once in a vision I see—careening down upon me, down the coal chute of the cheery years, all my Christmas gifts—the toy soldiers, the cowboy outfit with white hat and bandanna and chaps, the golden six-gun with a revolving barrel, the little car you sat in and could pump with your feet, the red scooter with the rubber strip on it so you didn't slip off so easy, the successively bigger tricycles and then the bicycles and the books—Tom Sawyer and Penrod, the whole set, and Robinson Crusoe and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea with the dark and brooding Captain Nemo—and roller skates and ice skates and the basketball smelling of new rubber and the baseball bat signed by Duke Snider and the gray Pentron tape recorder that came with a wah-wah underwater sound and had to be sent back to the shop 15 times and still never worked right—so that I cursed all machines and the dullness of all men's ears that couldn't hear the wah-wah or the hardness of their hearts that made them deny it—and the airplane, a bright canary of a Piper Cub, cardboard not plastic, steered in flight with strings like a marionette but which I couldn't put together in a million years and my father and my Uncle Nickie spent every evening through New Year's sweating at till it flew and then there were the sets of chemistry and magic and the microscope and the erector set and there were the boats—an endless flotilla of ships—square-riggers and junks, clippers and galleons, and motor boats and tugs, submarines, too, and ocean liners and aircraft carriers and battleships and...

But all my gifts are mingled in my mind now. I can't tell if the gifts I got were the gifts I got or the gifts I wished for and never got, or if they were gifts I gave my own children. The lines between what was, what might have been, and what I yearned for or experienced in dreams have become very porous.

Sometimes when I'm weary of well-doing I wonder what's the good of getting gifts if you can't remember what you got? Or what's worse, thinking you got things you never got at all? Ah, from what source flow the rivers of desire and into what evanescent ocean do they flow?