Secret Santa

Secret Santa has always held a peculiar level of excitement for me. It’s a mix of apprehension and intrigue. I enjoy the secrecy, not for knowing who has drawn my name, but for the name I have drawn. I suppose everyone feels the same thing.

The end of the year was drawing closer. One of my family members had suggested the idea of Secret Santa, something that on previous occasions had not held such collective appeal as it did now. My family are all very much into the traditions of our Christmas experience, and I more than understood what the restriction of Secret Santa would do to this. But Secret Santa would be new. It would be different. Finding something special for just one person provided the opportunity to really narrow in on that thing that could make them go ‘Wow!’ Not for the material or the act or anything that could be wrapped up in paper and bow. That thing that communicated love and knowing and everything that Secret Santa was supposed to provide. When each of us chose to be involved there would be something so very unique about the whole thing, and that excited me.

My addition to the concept of Secret Santa was that we should all make something. Creating with my own hands has been a very important part of how I communicate love, and learning a new skill to be able to do so has been a huge part of this. I have trawled through online videos, bought new tools, built tools, crafted, tried and tested, and sometimes failed. But when it worked, it worked. This year I was so very ready.

I would say my enthusiasm for Secret Santa was in some part due to my location, and the distance from which I had experienced Christmas from the rest of my siblings. I had been overseas, interstate, even in the air, when my brother, three sisters, partners and mother had shared meals, conversations, laughs, and memories. I had seen photos and videos, but had been absent from the Christmas traditions of my family, both physically and mentally, for many of these, and there was an aspect of this I was embarrassed by. But this was a chance to shape something else.

My family had mixed feelings around the creative side of the plan. Some of them shared the same kind of creative tendencies. My mum could make a motor from matchsticks, a palace from paper she had such an eye for detail. One of my sisters liked to create an experience, to curate and conjure. And my brother was very much about the presence. He often filled the room with his humour.

So, with the intricacies of Secret Santa negotiated, we used one of the many websites and apps available to settle the draw. I logged in, ‘spun’ the digital wheel, and it landed…

My breath held.

It was perfect. It was terrible. It was everything.

Part of the distance from which I have been from my family comes down to a very simple fact. I am awful at communication. It has never been deliberate. Nor malicious. It is something even I cannot comprehend and is a weakness of character I do not often admit to. There is no ‘but’ to end this paragraph either. I have failed to return calls, respond to messages, to answer emails. I have let spaces grow and created a distance beyond the physical that is difficult to measure. Some have been rescinded. Others fester.

I have held promises of contact that for months, even years at a time I have assured myself I will do. Each day, each evening, something else stands in the way. ‘Just get that done first,’ I would say to myself. ‘Just finish this off.’

University assignments. Work. Kids who don’t sleep are an easy excuse. Then there is the fear you will wake them with the sound of your voice. There is the fecklessness of distraction and how long it can restrain. And finally, there is the panic of the time that has passed.

I looked upon the name I had drawn. It was my sister’s.

When we were growing up there was somewhat of an unspoken understanding between this particular sister and I. I was the oldest, followed by my brother. Then my sister and our two sisters below her. We were both the eldest of each gender. A responsibility that has existed and grown as we too have aged. We have shared similar misunderstandings and experiences. We have bonded over the obscure, which includes a long-running science fiction show that is not Star Trek, comedians and witticisms of the unfunny, difficulties that have been mulled over through countless meals, and the haunting finale of a Ryan Reynolds thriller. She became friends with many of the people I had called friends, she has travelled and longed and loved as I have too. But all of this happened a time ago. A time that has transformed us both.

We live differently now. We know very little of each other beyond that of the surface. We have been together amongst our family on a few short occasions too. To me, my sister’s life is a collection of stories I have amassed over the intervening years. Some from her mouth, but many not. I remember when she moved northward. Right now the length of a country raw and red with affliction in many ways separates us. Climate differs. Voices differ. I have not yet visited her in her home. Nor has she visited mine. I have been through the eye of a cyclone and watched islands disintegrate. She has been in the bowl of a flood and watched her house be gutted. I have held the anxieties of others. She has held those that are her own.

She works in a place I would love to work. More than a few of my friends have received emails with her signature at their base. I wonder how many others would have had their resumes cross her desk. Those that know all speak fondly of her too. “She was really lovely,” one of them remarked while we shared a yacht anchored by an island in the middle of the Pacific.

There is almost a decade of words that need to be shared, and a thousand moments that should have been communicated. And when the opportunity comes I often panic. I hope for the moment I will see her in person and all of this will come out, to only have had that moment and watch it pass. When I see her name on my phone as a missed call, and realise I have done it again. To pick up that phone and hope that the next call will be everything I want from it, and perhaps, that she wants from it too.

The Secret Santa site sends messages. Reminders to create a wish list. They were becoming what the calls and messages had for so long. I couldn’t bring myself to wish for anything. When I tried the site connected me to something far from what I had aimlessly suggested.

I did check my sister’s wish list though. I browsed the things that were there and could in no way draw inspiration. I didn’t want to find something she had chosen. I didn’t want to make this easy. I owed her more than a casual purchase. And besides, I had been the one to suggest creating a gift in the first place. There was no manner of skill that I could acquire to build a hair straightener or glass tumblers.

And so it began.

I knew how hard she and her wonderful partner had worked to rebuild their home, their life. I had seen pictures of their garden and the splendour that came from it. I had watched videos of cockatoos ravaging their vegetables, and had seen the comfort of their new dog, a recent addition that was growing quickly. All of these things and more sparked ideas. Between work tasks was a notepad scrawled with these ideas. Crosses drawn through them almost as quickly as they had been evoked. I lay in bed with final thoughts flashing over notions both good and bad. I knew what I had to do. Just pick up the phone.

“Have you spoken to Jaime recently?” My brother would ask.

A sinking feeling would come over me before I could answer.

Then there was that time I forgot her birthday too.

The thing about being an older brother is not knowing when you’ve got it right, but knowing when you’ve got it wrong. When the words don’t come easily and the fear of a sibling relationship having soured becomes too real, that is not the moment you long for.

My message chain with her was filled with hopeful texts. Then, most recently:

‘Missed audio call’

‘Missed audio call’

‘Missed audio call’

Then me:

“Sorry :(“

“Sorry. Call you later?”

“I will call tomorrow with the kids FINALLY! Sorry.”

All this isn’t to say however that we had not communicated. Just that it wasn’t enough. Certainly not for me. I expect so for her too.

Secret Santa goes by many names in many places. It all has the same purpose though. The secrecy aspect of this is the only real rule. Not everyone gets it right. I have had my fair share of unusual Secret Santa gifts. I once received the first season of Survivor on DVD, and while in my possession it went unopened. My point is that Secret Santa is supposed to be more than the gift. It is an expression of knowing someone, friend, family, or foe, and communicating that in a meaningful way. Perhaps I was overthinking this whole thing, and perhaps what I needed was to communicate that thing to my sister that was most meaningful. The understanding that I had thought about her.

After failed attempts at gifts amassing though, I had finally struck the chord I wanted. It was faint and needed work. It had potential for a tragedy and nothing more. But it was a beginning.

My sister has a value to her that cannot be expressed by my words. She has been selfless amongst the selfish. Quiet amongst the loud. She has held hurts and overcome their tenacity. While the many things I want to know of her and her of me build and perhaps even lose intensity, there will always be more. For Secret Santa this year I had but one message I needed her to know, and it could not start with yet another ‘Sorry.’

And so, with the tool I know the most, I pressed three words into existence. Some might think them shallow. Others may find them vain. But upon the spectrum with which these words have been cast over mankind’s history, they came from me with a promise. Not one of the present, but for the future.

To my sister I say, I miss you.