Holiday 1976

Although we were perfectly happy as starving students with no expenses except food, utilities, gas and tuition, the holidays necessarily required some expenditure. We came up with minimal solutions for the extended family. For my family, we bought dollar-gifts like Frisbees and added them to a basket of popcorn balls. I can't remember what we did for the Thomases, although I suspect I made an apron for Carol, because she still talks about it. Maybe that was another year.

But for each other...Christmas morning, we opened our gifts for each other. David had made for me a terrarium--a beautiful glass enclosure filled with potting soil and plants, very fashionable at the time, and a book on how to care for it. And I had made for him a polo-style shirt, in an interesting blue-and-white pattern.

Nowadays we know that David only likes the most conservative patterns, and I have a brown thumb. But our efforts to please each other with no resources at all were loved and appreciated. And after a few minutes of exclaiming over the effort and craftsmanship, after the shirt was tried on and the plants poked at, we looked at each other and said, let's go see what's going on at our folks.

I have a very clear memory of New Year's Eve. We both had dreadful colds, and weren't going anywhere. David borrowed a little TV from his brother John (we didn't have a TV at that point)--it was black-and-white, and had a screen that was about 10". We placed it on top of something at the end of the bed, and fortified ourselves with--I don't know, Ritz crackers and orange juice comes to mind, but I might be making that up. Anyway, we huddled in bed with boxes of Kleenex and watched "A Man for All Seasons," which, in those days before VCRs, was what happened to be on. At some point, we looked at our clock and noted that midnight had passed, so we said, Happy New Year and finished the movie, eventually dozing off in a congested stupor. And, in fact, it was a happy New Year.