Christmas on Jane Street

by Billy Romp

  Back inside, working as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the children, Patti and I set up our tree in the stand. We hung ornaments, many of them handmade through the years by the children out of dry macaroni and cardboard, pinecones, cotton balls, and construction paper. We took special care with older pieces from Patti’s mother, hanging them on high boughs, out of the reach of Timmy, Santos, and Patches.

  When Patti was in the other room, I removed from my toolbox a special package I’d brought from the city. I speared open the cellophane overwrap, lifted out its contents, and began hanging its long, silvery strands on the branches. When Patti returned with several shopping bags full of presents, she stopped short in amazement.

  “But you don’t like tinsel,” Patti said. She was talking slowly, at half speed, as if she were making some kind of mental adjustment as she spoke.

  “You do,” I replied.

  I made my way out to the shop to put some finishing touches on my gift to Ellie. It was finished, really, except for some last-minute buffing. As I worked, I couldn’t help but wonder if Ellie would like it and understand its message.

  When I was satisfied, I placed my gift for Ellie, cushioned with tissue paper, into a sturdy box—the old-fashioned kind made with two distinct parts, a short top and a deep bottom. I went through a stack of newspaper cartoons looking for the right strips to put on top. The Romp family tradition of wrapping gifts in “the funnies” began as an economy measure in the sixties, but several of my sisters and I kept it going long after we had homes of our own and could afford real wrapping paper. It was our touchstone with tradition, our way of celebrating our past while linking it with our future. To complete Ellie’s package, I tied the package with some beautiful evergreen-colored grosgrain ribbon that I’d found at a specialty shop near Jane Street.

  I placed my gift on the floor, in an obscure spot in the corner behind the tree. I was hoping that Ellie wouldn’t notice my present until all the other gifts had been unwrapped, and all the excitement had died down. This way, the present would command her full attention.

  The kids slept until the sun shone full force into their windows. But once they opened their eyes and remembered that it was Christmas and that they were home in Vermont, it took them seconds to dress and come bounding down the stairs. Ellie dashed up to me and gave me a giant hug. “Merry Christmas!” she said, her eyes sparkling in anticipation of what lay ahead. Just as quickly as she arrived, she ran back upstairs, returning with another shirt on—a red flannel, almost identical to the one I was wearing. To correspond with my blue jeans, she had put on her beloved denim jumper.

  Fewer spectacles are more enjoyable than watching your children open presents on Christmas morning. I tell Patti and the kids every year that I would be happy receiving no gifts at all because my pleasure lies in watching them. (Of course, every year they ignore my plea.) The children started with their stockings, which were stuffed with oranges, walnuts, candy, small trinkets, and at least one tool for each child. There was a hammer in Henry’s stocking with a note attached: “Santa says that next year you’ll be old enough to nail the lights to the rack on Jane Street.”

  For the first time that Christmas, little Timmy caught on to how our gift-opening ritual worked. Each family member took his or her turn peeling off paper, with the rest of us acting as audience. Timmy would patiently wait his turn, but when it came, he held nothing back. He’d rip the paper covering his present to shreds and wad it into a launchable missile. Once he emptied a box, he’d stomp on it and shriek if he could make it pop.

  More seasoned in the ways of Christmas, Henry extended his role at center stage. When his moment came to unwrap, he would prolong the tension by pulling off the ribbon and removing the paper slowly. Then, when he discovered the item in a box or bag, he’d react with animated facial expressions, but delay producing it, so everyone was left to wonder for a moment what it was and whether or not he liked the gift. Always entertaining, his theatrics were worth the wait.

  Ellie opened her gifts thoughtfully. She used scissors to cut the tape where the edges of the paper overlapped, then after removing the wrapping neatly folded the sheets and slid them into a bag for reuse the following year; she detached the ribbons and bows from the package and put them into yet another bag. She finished all her housekeeping before getting to the reward.

  I could tell by the way her eyebrows arched when she first saw my gift that she knew it was from me. Perhaps reading my mind once again—or perhaps planning it all on her own—she saved my gift for last.

  When the moment came, Ellie tugged at the ribbon and raised the box top. She peered inside, still not knowing what to expect. Then she lifted out my present, handling it as if she were a museum curator unpacking some priceless, irreplaceable treasure.

  When the tissue fell away from what she was holding and the present was revealed, her mouth fell open and her eyes met mine. Was it disappointment on her face, or some other emotion? It was hard to tell. Clearly, this was not what she had been expecting. At that moment my daughter reminded me of how Patti had reacted earlier that morning to my putting tinsel on the tree. Like her mother, Ellie seemed to be taking in not only her present but a new version of me.

  “Oh, Daddy,” she said at last. “A nutcracker!”

  The toy nutcracker I’d carved stood twelve inches tall. He was garbed in complete dress uniform: a fancy red helmet and matching jacket with gold epaulets. Several impressive military medals adorned his jacket, and there were gold bands at his cuffs. He had black hair, a curly mustache, a goatee, and a nose that would have seemed exceedingly prominent if it weren’t for his mouth. Oversized, his mouth was unified by a deck of sharp pearly whites that carried just a hint of menace. Lifting the nutcracker’s coattails activated his jaw. I’d tested him out a number of times: stick a walnut in his mouth and pull his coattails, and the shell would crush, liberating its meaty center.

  Examining the nutcracker as thoroughly as an obstetrician checks a newborn, Ellie worked the nut-cracking lever up and down. “How did you ever?” she started, gazing up at me in wonder. She had enough experience with wood carving herself to know how hard my job had been, and just how difficult it must have been to keep my project a secret on Jane Street.

  “Oh, it was nothing.”

  “And I thought you were making me something else. Like a toolbox.”

  “That was my dream for you, not yours,” I said. “Once I realized that, I scrapped my plan and decided to make what you wanted.”

  It is said that change never happens overnight. And that may be right. Perhaps genuine change works its way through your system gradually—chipping away at barriers in your unconscious and making breakthroughs when you least expect them. But it sure didn’t feel that way at the time. It felt like I’d been struck by some powerful force that night at the party, transformed into a new person. Then and there, I vowed to part company with my old self. I decided to give Henry the gift he was coveting, the one I’d been making all year for Ellie—the toolbox. I decided to make Ellie the thing she wanted most, a nutcracker. The gift was meant as my blessing for Ellie to pursue whatever dreams she dreamed, even if they departed from my own. As long as she had it, the gift would remind her of her big night at The Nutcracker, and all the obstacles she’d overcome to get there. With that gift, I’d made a promise to myself to stand behind her wherever she might go in life.

  Ellie was sitting on the couch in front of the tree when I squatted before her, my face about level with the nutcracker’s. I was one of those people who had a hard time apologizing. I would know in my heart when the need was there, but it was never easy to express in words. I took a deep breath and then the plunge. “If I made it hard on you this year, I want to tell you how sorry I am,” I started. “I’ve always known that I should let you be your own person and pursue your dreams. But, in my heart, I felt that if you went places I wasn’t going, you were leaving me behind.”

  Tears welled in Ellie’s eyes as I s
poke. “When you didn’t want me to go to The Nutcracker, I thought you were mad at me.”

  I reached for my daughter and held her tightly. “Ellie,” I said. “No matter where you go in life—no matter what you do—I’ll always love you and support you. I consider you a miracle, always have, just as I did the day you’were born. This nutcracker is here to remind you of how I feel. I’m only human, so even if I mess up, he’ll carry the message; he’ll never forget.”

  Just as suddenly as her tears had come, they were gone. “Know what?” she said brightly. “Next year when we go to Jane Street—if I sell twice as many candles, maybe three times as many as this year—and I can afford it—” She paused, studying me intently. “Could I, I mean, would you go if I paid to take you and the family to The Nutcracker?”

  I didn’t answer her immediately, but a smile broke out on my face, so she could tell I would offer no objection. Ellie wasted no time spinning out a new dream.

  “Even Timmy—he’ll be old enough then. I’m just dying for you to see it. Especially the tree.”

  “You don’t think I see enough trees in what I do?” I kidded. “You’re going to take me to Lincoln Center to see a tree?”

  “But this tree is like no other,” Ellie started. She could tell I was teasing, so she kept on, becoming more extravagant as she proceeded. “It grows like Jack and the Beanstalk. It almost comes alive onstage, kind of like our trees.”

  “I wouldn’t go just to see a tree, but I would go to see the ballerinas and the dance of the sugarplum fairies. And I’d definitely go to see you all dressed up in your fancy black velvet outfit. If it still fits.”

  “Well, if I’m buying the tickets, you’d better be dressed right.”

  “You mean, you wouldn’t take me as I am,” I said, feigning indignation and snapping one of my suspenders.

  “No way,” she said. “You’d better start getting your outfit ready. Coat, tie, dress pants, the works.”

  I haven’t worn a tie since my wedding. Or was it my high school prom? In the past I would have raised an objection—told her I wouldn’t go because I didn’t feel comfortable dressing up. Or it might have been a matter of principle, my problem with spending so much money on some fleeting pleasure. I would have found a reason. But at that moment, I knew better. I would put on a coat and tie for my daughter. I would take an evening off from the stand. I would be by her side, cheering on her dreams and decisions, pitching in to help wherever life took her.

  Sure, I was the man of the house and took pride in my role as provider. And just as I’d hoped and prayed at the start of the season, tree sales had broken all records that year, getting us over a major hump financially. But I knew that Christmas morning that I’d remember this season not for what I’d made but what I’d learned.

  Ellie’s gift to me that year was showing me how to be a good father. Not that she set out to teach me a lesson, or even knew in advance what I needed to know. It just worked out that way. I’d always thought I understood what being a father was all about. My version had included spending lots of time with my children and teaching them the fundamentals. And those are good things. I hate to admit it, though, but I see now that I’d gotten a little smug somewhere along the way. Just look at how great my children were, I said to myself! How bright, how considerate, how well behaved and well liked they were! In hindsight, I realize that, in Ellie, I’d seen a miniature version of myself. It had been easy to love her that way. It had been harder when she was behaving like someone else entirely—”someone” I wasn’t comfortable, or familiar, with.

  My struggle with Ellie made me think about my customers. They came back to my stand year after year—and considered themselves my friends—because they liked the way I treated them. I gave them rope, I let them be themselves. It’s strange how you can have a special gift like mine and apply it so effectively in one area of your life but so ineffectively in another. I had turned on my talent for people with my customers but not with my family.

  The gift I received from Ellie that Christmas was a lesson in how to give without expecting anything in return. Not a tree sale, or a helper, not someone to take care of me in my old age. Once I really “got” the gift, once I really understood it, I was overcome by a feeling of headiness. It felt a bit like giving away the wreaths and trees on Jane Street. I learned that Christmas that what I needed most was to learn how to give for the sake of giving. Once I’d learned to give Ellie away—to give her to herself—I had embraced the true meaning of Christmas.

  For some reason deep within her, Ellie needed to go to The Nutcracker that Christmas. And ever since she’d gone, I’d watched her come alive like my Christmas trees after I snip the string. Ellie had told me that first day on Jane Street that you learn by trying new things. And she was right. She needed to learn by testing her wings. That was precisely what she was doing. And now she had my blessing.

  Ellie was holding the nutcracker in her arms when suddenly she jumped off the couch and took center stage on the floor. From the way she was standing, holding her shoulders back and her back erect like a ballerina, I wondered if she weren’t imagining herself in the part of Clara onstage at Lincoln Center. She thrust the nutcracker up in the air and then did a perfect pirouette on the toe of her tennis shoe. As I watched her, she appeared graceful and ladylike, looking once again more like the woman she would become than the tomboy she still was.

  Catching her fire, I jumped up to join her where she was standing. “I’ll go to The Nutcracker next year!” I said, wanting with my whole heart and soul to go. Suddenly the opportunity to see The Nutcracker—this ballet that had changed my daughter’s life—seemed like an enormous privilege, one of life’s greatest. “Our whole family will. We’ll all be there together!”

  Ellie gazed up at me, her eyes radiating happiness, anticipation, and the ultimate contentment of a child who’s well loved.

  “Once we shake out the needles from this season,” I said, “we’ll have an entire year to get ready for the big night!”

  Afterword

  My family has seen twenty years of selling Christmas trees on Jane Street in New York City. First Ellie, then Henry and Timmy, started in diapers on Jane Street, and they grew up, mostly in Vermont, partly in Greenwich Village, never seeing a December in the mountains. Ellie, now twenty-one, grew from a cute girl to a beautiful, enterprising young woman, quickly becoming a mother, wife, businesswoman, and homeowner.

  Let me tell you about Ellie and her life since Christmas on Jane Street was published ten years ago. Though Ellie really loves the West Village friends and customers she’s known all her life, I see now that I worried needlessly about my daughter’s attraction to bright lights and big city life—her real passion has always been horses.

  By age twelve Ellie had sold enough candles on Jane Street to buy her first horse. Ginger was a thoroughbred mare that Ellie loved beyond reason. Ellie bred Ginger to an Arabian, yielding Captain, her first foal. That was just the beginning. The Ellie who has emerged as a young woman is a hard worker, someone more comfortable in barn boots than designer heels, someone who took the work ethic from our Jane Street days and applied it to her own life choices. Patti and I have helped her along in the way parents do, but Ellie developed her own enterprise, determined to make a living in the horse business on her own terms. Encouraging Ellie’s passion when she was eight years old may be the biggest part I have played in the whole business. That and the bike trip.

  In 1999, a year after Jane Street was published, we took a little trip, by bicycle, from Vermont to Homer, Alaska, the westernmost point on the North American road system. It took us six months to travel 4,500 miles. Our bike was a four-seater, a kind of stretch tandem, that fit our whole family on board except for Timmy, who was riding in a trailer behind. You’d have to have seen us riding down the highway pedaling in unison, all dressed alike to appreciate the effect we had on people. We broke through any communication barriers instantly.

  We toured fully prepared
for camping, but we seldom did so because we met so many people who were determined to host us for the night. The trip brought us attention almost daily in newspaper articles and TV features; we received national exposure on ABC News, on NPR, in People magazine, and on The Oprah Winfrey Show. We learned a lot of things, but one lesson stands out: anything is possible.

  This message motivated Ellie to establish her own stable, Salisbury Station Stable, before the age of twenty. Ellie saw how to get from her vision to her destination, a lesson she learned as a child turning tree stumps and candles into horses and stables. Due to these experiences, she was free to envision anything.

  Not that it was all smooth sailing. Always headstrong and mature beyond her years, Ellie liked to make her own mistakes. “Oops,” she’d say, and forge onward, learning all she could from each error. If they were small mistakes, we all laughed, and Ellie paid for the bigger ones without regret. We shared common views on most things and sharply disagreed on a few matters. But we talked every day and listened to each other too.

  One day, I had the talk that fathers fear having with their daughters. I was at work when the call came from Ellie.

  Knowing that she wouldn’t bother me in the middle of the day to chit-chat, I put down my tools, walked outside with the phone, and asked her what was up.

  “Dad,” she said, “I’m pregnant.” She was sixteen.

  “Congratulations! When are you due?”

  Missing the hint of irony in my voice, she tearfully thanked me for my positive reaction. To this day, Ellie continues to thank me for being the first person to support her in those trying days. She never considered any alternative to bearing and keeping her baby, and I knew her well enough to intuit this even before she announced her plan.