You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Texas Instruments calculator, the saltwater aquarium with real sharks, the platform shoes. None of it would be mine.
    For the rest of my life, I would be on Santa’s naughty list, right there at the very top. Mine was the one house he could mark off his list with black, permanent marker.
    And Jesus, God’s only child, certainly he, too, was watching me from the sky, his eyes narrow with bewilderment, disgust.
    I had displeased them both and would be punished.
    I’d ruined not only Christmas, but any chance I ever had of getting into heaven. And this realization caused my nose to itch madly but I could not scratch it. Because my hands were still bound to the rails along either side of the hospital bed. I may have been lying flat on clean white sheets, but I was most certainly crucified.

And Two Eyes Made
Out of Coal
     
     
    F OR AS LONG as I could remember my mother would buy an intricate, often handcrafted advent calendar and hang it on the refrigerator. It was she who introduced me to the concept of a calendar for the month of December, a countdown to Christmas. Where each date from
1
to
25
was printed on a little door you could open. And behind the door, a visual surprise—a little scene or charming sketch. I wanted nothing more than to sit on the floor with the thing and tear off all the doors at once so I could get immediately to Christmas.
    I had, over the years, developed something more than a fondness for the paper calendar. Each Christmas when the calendar went up, I stopped
living
and started
waiting.
My mother surely must have regretted ever introducing me to the advent calendar, because now she could never take it away. It would be like getting your child hooked on heroin and then withholding their needle.
    Only one row of doors remained closed on the advent calendar. For the last eighteen days, it had been the single focus of my life. My mother would not allow me to open a new door before eight o’clock in the evening. By seven each night, I was sitting on the floor in front of the refrigerator like a dog, staring up at the calendar and asking her every few minutes, “Is it almost eight o’clock?”
    Always, there was a fleeting disappointment upon opening the door because the image revealed was never one I recognized. “What is that? What does some old man on a camel have to do with Christmas?”
    My mother leaned over to inspect the image in question and then she explained. “Oh, look at that! What a beautiful image. See, now I believe these are actually woodblock prints behind the doors. But done with such fine, fine detail. I would love to be able to achieve a line like that,” she said, pointing to the hump on the camel’s back.
    “But what
is
it?”
    “Well, this is one of the Three Wise Men, I imagine. On his way to see Jesus. Or maybe he’s just riding around in the desert for some fresh air. Look at the way they captured the wind on the sand, it’s gorgeous. You know, I bought this calendar from Faces in Amherst. It’s German. I wish I’d picked up those napkin rings while I was there.”
    By this point, I was no longer listening to her and was instead focused on the next night’s door. Surely, there was something better under
that
door.
    The last week was always the worst. It was like an unbearable itch I could not reach. “You have waited patiently for three hundred and forty-five days and you only have one more week,” my mother would tell me.
    But somehow, this one week seemed longer than all the others combined. So I was constantly seeking a distraction, but one that was related to Christmas. My mother helped by offering to sit with me and string cranberries and popcorn together into long garlands for the tree. We each had a needle and thread as we sat before the television set with a large bowl of popcorn and a bag of fresh cranberries on the table between us.
    But even this couldn’t go on for a week. “Oh my God, you need to put that mess down now and go wash your hands