Presents - Part 1 - Receiving

I love presents, getting them and giving them, although in my experience, when on the receiving side of the equation, they are usually at their best before you know exactly what they are.

I was about six when I first realised this, on a long ago Christmas morning. It was still dark when I woke, but even through the gloom I could make out a package resting at the end of my bed that hadn't been there the evening before.

I knew I had to wait until at least one other member of the family was up before touching the package, and so I lay staring at it for what seemed like hours. The sun rose, and as the pale dawn light began seeping through the window, I was able to make out the package's outline more and more clearly. To pass the time, I tried to imagine what it might contain.

I came up with fifteen or twenty possibilities before my brother burst in and we were able to start tearing paper and showing each other the things that the paper had concealed.  We each had been left, ( by someone who, despite the fact that I am a fairly credulous personality, I do not remember ever thinking was anyone other than our parents), stockings stuffed with many small things, so it took a while before I got round to the mysterious parcel.

When at last I did get to it and ripped off its wrapping, I discovered an object I hadn't even thought of lying inside.

It was a Russian nesting doll. It was made of wood, and brightly painted, and I kept it for many years. Strangely enough though, now that I remember it, I realise that I haven’t seen it in a long, long while. I don't remember throwing it away but it may have got lost on a move between one posting and another. Or perhaps at some stage I handed it on as a present to someone else's child.

If I did, I wonder what the recipient thought of it. I have to admit that when I first saw it I felt mildly disappointed, even though it was much better than most of the things I'd imagined that I was going to receive. It says much about the respect I had for the adults in my life that I had pretty much decided that what the package contained was either a blue and white china jar (my father was mad about blue and white porcelain) or a colourful enamel flower pot, (my mother loved gardening).

I didn't look forward to either of these objects - what six year old would? However, until I knew finally and definitely what exactly my present was, even if it might be one of the to-me-at-least unexciting possibilities that I had conjured up in my mind's eye, there was an oddly pleasurable uncertainty to be enjoyed.

But now I was faced with reality - this colourful nest of Russian ladies - and, in its presence, every other possibility vanished into thin air. Reality had taken the place of imagination, and it offered a narrowing of perspective. Just as it is deflating, however much you want to know "whodunnit", to arrive at a mystery story's conclusion, as the resolution can somehow never be as satisfying as the shadowy, half-formed speculations that lurk in your mind while the puzzle remains unresolved, so the sudden disappearance of all those other imaginary presents left me feeling less as if I had been given something and more as if I'd had countless unknown objects snatched away.