For Christmas I receive a stocking taller than I am, made of red netting like the sort in which onions are bagged, only stronger, and stuffed with all manner of breakable and briefly interesting things, proving that the idea and experience of bounty is better than the specific components of abundance: little cars of fragrant plastic whose wheels turn on wire axles that can be popped loose and examined; hard candies; sweet, chalky wafers strung together into wristlets and necklaces. Small, provocative puzzles. These are shallow cylinders of cardboard, both ends sealed with a circle of hard plastic beneath which you can see a picture (a fat man with a beard, a circus seal atop a harlequin drum). In the pictures are little holes; in the cylinder are little steel balls, and the idea is to tilt and spin the sealed little world until the balls fall into place. The operation is delicate, and doomed, since a jostle means it’s incomplete again, and anyway, if you “solve” one side, the other’s in disarray. We open our presents on Christmas Eve; my father and Sally take me for a walk, just after twilight, each holding one of my hands, and along the way my father says, “Hey, did you see that?” What? “That streak of red, that sleigh, didn’t you see that flash? That was Santa Claus going by.” My sister says she heard the jingle of sleigh bells. I don’t believe in Santa Claus. But did I hear it? By the time we’re home, the presents have come: elves’ work, in bright dime-store papers, under the tree with its fat bulbs in the cheery simplicity of their crayon-box colors: blue and green, orange and red.

Too many lights outside, my mother says, make a house look honky-tonk. This year of the Daughters of the Eastern Star and having a maid who is at least partly ours, my mother seems to be interested in removing us from vulgarity. Or rather she’s come to see other possibilities than she’s known, and she has it in mind for us to align ourselves with that different life. And in fact the best of my presents is the most high toned, an oversize volume about archaeologists and their digs, each section devoted to a different culture, pages crowded with paintings of golden discoveries: horned and winged masks and vessels, and the earrings and breastplates of heroes and gods.