My earliest Christmas gift memories don’t have to do with hanging stockings for Santa and leaping out of bed on Christmas morning to see what he had unloaded from his sleigh. My sister and I already knew what our main presents were going to be: new outfits for our dolls made by my mother and some item of doll furniture made by my father in his basement woodshop. On Christmas Eve, we would line up all the dolls on the living room couch: our Shirley Temple dolls, our Betsy McCall dolls, our Penny Brite dolls. On Christmas morning, there they would be, still in a row, but now radiant in new attire. One year my father gave us wooden beds for our Gerber baby dolls; another year a doll highchair appeared; one year we finally had the perfect place to store all the doll clothes in a new doll closet.As with all holiday traditions, the familiar and expected always felt somehow surprising and wondrous. There the dolls were, yet again, in their new outfits! There my father was, yet again, with his proud smile at our pleasure in the new doll furniture!
Every single Christmas, there He is, Baby Jesus in the manger! There they are, the shepherds abiding in the fields and the three kings bearing gifts! They never fail to come, and yet their coming never fails to thrill. Every single Christmas Eve, we fall on our knees as we hear, yet again, the angels singing the same ever-old-and-ever-new song, on this holy night once again sung just for us.
—Claudia Mills
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