I was about sixteen years old, staying the night at my friend Pat Francescon's house. His folks were out having dinner. We were looking at his family's Christmas tree, talking about every sixteen-year-old's favorite subject... "whatever." So as I'm talking, he walks over to the tree and roots around through the presents stacked high under its lowest boughs. He grabs a large, soft-looking present and plops down on the other end of the couch. Then he begins to carefully unwrap one end of it.
"What's up?" I ask him. "Oh, nothing," Pat explains, as if forgetting that I was in the room--bearing witness to the cardinal Christmas sin that he was committing. "I was just wondering if this was that Notre Dame jersey that I kept asking my mom for... Yup! It is." Satisfied, he rolled the shirt back up, slid it carefully into the cylinder-shaped wrapping paper shell, aligned the tape to its original place on the paper, and put it back under the tree.
"You do that with all your presents?" I asked him. He nodded. "Pretty much, yeah. Everybody does in my family." Yeah, yeah, likely excuse.
That night, I crashed out on the couch in the living room. It was pretty late when I cracked my eyes to a creak in the floor and a shadow passing between my eyelids and the bright Christmas tree in front of me. It was Pat's mom. I wasn't sure what she was doing at first... maybe adding a few presents to the pile while everyone's sleeping. Then she crouched down and pulled a present from the pile. She proceeded to quietly unwrap it. No way, I thought. Like mother, like son. Sure enough, she held up the new nightgown away from herself, then put it to herself against the nightgown she was wearing. She smiled to herself--(apparently somebody done right)--then re-wrapped the present, replaced it under the tree, and headed back to bed.
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