The Hat In the Box Story

          “And this one Daddy, this is your Hat”.  With this phrase, or very similar words my baby sister Mary Kay spoiled everyone’s Christmas more than five decades ago.  At least that is what I thought at the time.

          I think we lived in Bokoshe, Oklahoma at the time—I believe I was in the third grade—my other sister JoAnn, of course, was a year behind me.  If I have the time right it was 1943 or 1944, during World War II.  By then JoAnn and I, having successfully completed our early school years, were both rather intelligent.  Mary Kay, naturally, had just begun to learn to speak.  She was still in the infantile stage, probably wearing diapers, and had not yet begun to be a pain-in-the-neck demanding to participate in mine and JoAnn’s play fun.  She often went walking off with her Daddy while JoAnn and I were engaged in our games which suited us just fine.  Throughout the war years very few of what we presently consider to be everyday necessities were available to most families there in Eastern Oklahoma.  Many common foods were not available and many were rationed.  We had no automobile.  Our only source of news and entertainment was an old Zenith Radio which I think was given to us by relatives.  Although I was not aware of it, our family must have been very poor.  I think it must have been very difficult for Mama and Daddy especially at Christmas Time.  Somehow though, that Christmas our parents scraped together enough money for one gift for each of us.  I can remember only two of them:  Mine and Dads.

          Dad nearly made me crazy with my wrapped up gift.  He told me what it was; only he used a word I had never heard.  He told me it was a furbisher.  He teased me about it for a number of days as Christmas approached.  It lay there under the Christmas tree in a box, and I stewed and dithered wondering what it was.  I can remember asking Dad over and over to tell me, but all he would say was that he had already told me what it was:  A furbisher.  I’m sure we had a dictionary, or that I could have looked the word up somewhere, but somehow this idea never occurred to me.  This one-sided teasing was fun for Dad, and for me, but it made me insane.  I wanted somehow to be able to do it back to him.

          Dad’s gift was a hat.  As I think back on it today, after years of married life, I realize that my Mama and Daddy had no secrets; that we had so little that it would have been very impractical for Mother to have purchased a hat for Dad without his knowledge.  I don’t know where she got the hat; whether it was second-hand or brand new; or whether or not it was a good hat.  So, even though Mama made us children think it was a secret; he had to have known about the hat.  If it was new I’d guess he picked it out and tried it on for sizing.  Mama, perhaps because Dad had teased me so much about my gift, waited until Dad was gone visiting, and with the help of me and the girls wrapped his hat in a box and put it under the Christmas tree.  All the while she told us it was a secret, and not to tell.  She was teaching us how much fun it is to give and receive gifts.  Now that everyone had a gift our Christmas was complete.  She told us all several times that when Daddy came home it was all right to show him that now he also had a gift under the tree, and that he would ask what was in the box, but that it was a secret, and we were not to tell.  I can remember the feeling today—a fullness similar to when you eat too much dinner—of knowing a secret which I was not to tell even if my Dad asked me—of being able to get back at Daddy for the teasing he had done to me.  Oh, what a feeling!

          Sure enough, just before supper time Dad came striding up to the front door, and he was home.  I can’t remember who pointed out the new gift under the tree, and I can’t remember exactly how it happened.  I don’t know whether Dad asked me or JoAnn about his gift.  I do remember vividly Mary Kay pointing to each gift explaining who it was for and when she came to Dad’s gift saying, “And this one Daddy, this one is your hat”.  It was as if the world had come to an end for me.  How could she have done this so easily, just threw our wonderful secret away?  I was so angry I know I was near tears, maybe I cried.

          So that is what one Christmas was like when I was a boy, oh so many years ago.