“How could it be so?
It came without ribbons! Boxes or bags!”
And he puzzled three hours ’til his puzzler was sore.
“Maybe Christmas,” he thought, “means a little bit more.”
—Dr. Seuss

For the past few weeks watching and listening to the fiasco being played out in the Senate was making me more and more cynical. It didn’t help when I heard about two of my neighbors getting laid off for Christmas, and every time we went out and about town we’d pass desolate looking people on street corners and at Interstate exits with signs in their hands declaring themselves homeless, desperate or hungry–sometimes all three. But it came anyway, Christmas that is. And though I despaired the wide chasm between the haves and the have nots as I imagined life might have felt like in Medieval times when there were two classes, the gentry ed class and those existing only to serve them. Even though the people were speaking, no one at all was listening. Christmas! Bah, humbug!

But a very small thing happened and began to usher in my own personal Christmas, coming in as it did a couple of days early,  and yes it came without ribbons or bags even though it did land on my door stoop in a box, and thus my Christmas saga begins.

Last week a blogger friend asked for my mailing address, and though I suspected she was up to something I complied and gave her my address, thinking  she was mailing me a picture of herself and her partner with the adorable little boy they’d adopted only a few days before. (She posted a beautiful Christmas story about him just today with pictures, in case you’d like to see him too.)

In October Rachel had mentioned she’d decided to hand out Moon Pies for Halloween treats this year. When I was a child, it was such a treat for me–on those rare occasions when I was allowed to tag along with my father to my uncle’s general store in Providence–to have a Moon Pie and an R.C. while I waited for him to finish his business. Everyone called them R-ahh-C colas. My uncle would say “I b’lieve I’m gon have myself a Moon Pie and an R-ahh-C. You want one too?” Did I want one? What did he think? Did a cat have a tail!?

I hadn’t seen a Moon Pie in years, so I decided it would be a wonderful idea for me to hand them out this year also. But nary a Moon Pie was to be found in all of SLC–at least the stores on my side of town and I’m pretty sure they won’t be found anywhere else in Utah either. So I wrote that as a comment on Rachel’s Halloween blog. . . poor me,  just one more thing a poor  displaced southern girl has to give up when she lives up north, or in this case the big wide southwest.

So the day before Christmas Eve, when Hubby and I came home from a last-round of grocery shopping before the BIG day, this package was waiting on our door stoop. But it wasn’t a picture in that box after all. What it was was this:

Not just a Moon Pie, but a whole 12-piece-package of triple decker Moon Pies! Holy Toledo! Things have changed in the south since I was a kid! There was no such thing as a triple-decker then. The term “super size me” hadn’t been invented yet! I felt absolutely giddy with surprise! It was postmarked from Rachel. Imagine that someone so far away would go to so much trouble and expense to make an old southern girl like me begin to feel the world wasn’t just filled with bad old rich guys making decisions to help out other bad old rich guys who call themselves “health insurers” rather than what they really are: “insurers” of getting a bigger piece of the American pie.

To my knowledge Hubby had never tasted a Moon Pie before. He has now! That’s what we had for early morning Christmas breakfast with our first coffee. Yum!

It’s not the fact that someone gave me a gift that made me feel so good, it was the thought that went into it–acknowledging the little girl that still lives in me–is what makes this unexpected gift so special, not how much or little they cost. Like Dr. Seuss said–maybe there is a lot more to Christmas than stuff that comes in fancy packages and ribbons.

And that’s where I’ll leave this Christmas day saga today; I expect to complete my Christmas thoughts tomorrow. Meanwhile, I hope you all had a wonderful, fulfilling day with all the spirit and magic the holiday brings out of the blue sometimes.