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A Few Favorite Things

Ready to celebrate her perceived last Christmas, Eleanor completes a long desired life goal.

By Matthew AgnewPublished 3 years ago Updated 3 years ago 7 min read
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A Few Favorite Things
Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Always the one to pepper macabre undertones on a joyous occasion, Christmas for Eleanor meant two things...presents and death. This was, as a matter of fact, Eleanor’s 13th “last” Christmas. Four holiday seasons prior, it would surely be the last time she would gather her extended, matriarcal driven family in one spot. Her eyes could no longer register the difference between sugar, salt, and flour, so baking was out of the question (a point driven home by a particularly salt-heavy apple pie that sat largely uneaten at the post-Thanksgiving dessert table). If she could no longer provide her family with pie, what would be the point of continuing on?

Seven Christmases ago she abandoned her long standing tradition of a three day cookfest and allowed her great-niece the unwanted and high pressure game of feast management for 23, a task worsened by an unflappable desire to pillar the meal around something called a tofurkey; it was going to be her last Christmas after all, Eleanor thought, so might as well go out on bland and uninteresting note.

Yes, 89-year-old Eleanor thought of little else these days besides her timely demise.

“Now, you remember where I keep the fireproof safe, right?” Eleanor would say as she sensed her bi-weekly phone calls with her grandson coming to a close. “It has a copy of my will and a list of what I want to wear at my funeral. I do not want your mother taking my amethyst earrings. Those were a gift from pappa.”

Yet, despite her twelve failed predictions of a final Christmas, Eleanor was locked to task that this would be her last. So, with holiday tradition number two taken care of, all that was left was presents.

While time had taken Eleanor’s eyesight, it had also robbed her of her mediocre wealth. When her childless aunt Silvia passed away 15 years ago, everyone, except of course for Eleanor, saw the substantial inheritance as a bottomless windfall. Eleanor knew then what her family later came to comprehend, that there was a fatal flaw in Eleanor’s design that would prevent her from ever enjoying this new found sense of financial safety: charity.

That first Christmas after the inheritance, Eleanor’s family largely benefited from extravagant gifts and cards filled with crisp, twenty dollar bills freshly extracted from the drive-thru bank teller on Butler Street (the last in town that still allowed face to face transactions from the comfort of one's automobile.)

The second Christmas, the sad little church on Northampton Street received a shock when a donation of $15000 in cash arrived by personal courier, who also happened to be Eleanor’s previously mentioned grandson.

“Wow...thank you!” The part time church office manager exclaimed. “But wouldn't a check have been much easier?”

Her grandson/courier had only shrugged, wished the stunned parishioners in attendance a Merry Christmas and left. He knew Eleanor’s answer but kept it to himself. Checks were for groceries.

In the years that followed, certain family members would return to the Money Well of Eleanor in times of (supposed) need. Her brother Walter in Missouri needed money for food and firewood to get by until his pension check cleared. Her son Benjamin, still known as Baby Benji despite his impressive weight gain and status as a grandparent himself, lost his washer, dryer, tomato plants, pickup truck and two cats in a flash flood, and required help to metaphorically and literally bail him out of this Act of God induced predicament. And granddaughter Mary, oh Mary, despite an impressive collection of sneakers, was always complaining about financial hardship in the presence of Eleanor, which would always tug on both Eleanor’s heart and purse strings.

Now, after years of giving, Eleanor was down to a small, self-induced stipend. But, it didn’t matter; this season of giving had been planned months ago. Eleanor, who long had a love for the dramatic, also had a deep love for themes. Owing to the original desire for drama, this particular theme was sparked by her least favorite movie of all time, the Sound of Music.

Eleanor never understood the world’s infatuation with the film. Maria clearly was a problem, and the fact that anyone would dress multiple children in tacky, moth eaten drapery and still win a cold man’s heart with song instead of food had placed the musical in the realm of fantastical fiction and unimaginative storytelling in Eleanor’s mind.

Yet, there was one component of that dreadful picture that Eleanor always found clever...the brown paper packages tied up with string. Coming from an age where shopping was done in specialized stores, this lyric always tickled Eleanor, as the only package she could recall that came wrapped in brown paper and tied with string was meat from the butcher shop. Surely, fresh pork chops would not have impressed a sense of favoritism upon the young and flippant Maria...no, these packages were meant to be more.

So, Eleanor had decided to create a literal and physical element out of song and had wrapped 25 (the family had grown slightly in recent years) of her own favorite things in thick brown paper, complimented nicely with emerald green yarn and her best arthritic attempt at at beautiful, shoelace-esk bow to top each package.

The endeavor had taken her much, much longer than she imagined, yet, there at the bottom of her closet hidden underneath a 56-year-old afghan, was the finished fruits of her labor. To say she was quite pleased with herself would be a significant underutilization of the words “quite” and “pleased.” Eleanor had dreamed of this accomplishment for decades. While she disliked the phrase “bucket list” since she never once in her long and experienced life had seen or placed a list into a bucket, this completed task definitely checked off a life goal.

While the literal nature and cleverness of the wrapping would not be lost on her family, there was one added element of irony to this exercise. Eleanor not only wrapped her favorite and occasionally valuable possessions in brown paper, but she had also ordered each item from 1 to 25 (the family had grown slightly in recent years), with the first and smallest package being her most cherished. Then, only in her mind as she dared not create evidence that such a thing ever existed, she placed her own family member into a similar list of favorites. She wondered if anyone would ever figure it out. Not that it mattered much, this being her last Christmas and all.

Many of the items were family heirlooms. In package number 22 there was Aunt Silvia’s 8 karat diamond ring which would be bequeathed to the shoe obsessed Mary. Eleanor knew that the ring would quickly be sold and turned into extravagant South American holidays, inexplicable tattoos and unneeded footwear, but she didn’t mind. Eleanor had never cared much for Silvia in the first place.

Package 3 contained a list of handwritten letters that her great-great grandfather had written to his then mistress while wintering at Camp Chase during the Civil War. Eleanor had always been exorbitantly proud of her family’s direct and proven connection to the Union Army. This was designated for her daughter-in-law Patty, who shared Eleanor’s deep love of family history, and who had complained the least about the now infamous Apple Pie mishap.

The majority of the gifts fell into similar categories; her uncle’s monogrammed pocket watch for her nephew Xavier, a cookbook she created, designed, and published for a hospital charity event for her bed-ridden sister-in-law Marie who dreamed of cooking once again, a collection of pristine toy cars that had belonged to her older brother for her great-grandson Archie.

She smiled as she glanced at the packages, only to pause with a stern and solemn look at the small, rectangular package placed gently at the apex of the pile. Number 1. She leaned forward, body creaking and howling in disagreement, and ran her fingers along the short green strings.

She knew, and he knew, what they meant to each other. Should the ruse of favoritism ever be unveiled, the rest of the family would probably guess that this item fell towards the bottom of the list, and they would likely be shocked at its recipient. But not them. Eleanor’s smile returned, and she slowly rose up, closed her closet door, and shuffled out of her room. This would definitely be a last Christmas to remember.

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