Stocking Stuffers by Dona mcintyre

Prompt: Stocking Stuffers

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Arlene and her children lived in a very old one-and-a-half-bedroom house. The house was in poor repair, with missing shingles and duct tape stretched over cracked windows to keep out the harsh December winds. While the children were always scrubbed and dressed in decent clothes for school, Arlene lived on Welfare.
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Struggling with peer pressure, Arlene spent her Christmas money on gifts for all the children who attended the school and items for their parents to keep up the façade that her family was just like theirs, although everyone knew they weren’t.

​Arlene couldn’t accept her poverty, surrounded by people who came from far more affluent neighborhoods than the one she lived in and left her own family without Christmas gifts. Arlene was trying to keep up with the wealthy people who could afford to go to private school without help from aunts with money, like Arlene’s.

With Christmas approaching, her neighbors, Cynthia and Adam, noticed that Arlene was spending all her money on others and neglecting her children.

The neighbors, not without their own struggles, decided to play Secret Santa. This idea came after they realized the little house beside them sat quietly in the dark without a tree in the window or brightly lit lights sparkling around the property.

Many stores were open the night before Christmas, and although prices were still high for last-minute shoppers, there were some sales. The shopkeepers knew that most people would buy discounted chocolates rather than presents tomorrow, as Christmas would be over for the year.

Adam and Cynthia set out to find the perfect gifts for the two boys and the girl next door.

“Hallelujah”! (A joyful refrain from a Christmas song), they cried, spotting just the right toys in a store that stayed open late.

Buying stockings and stuffing them with all sorts of fun little gadgets, Christmas oranges that broke apart, candy, and comic books, grabbing a doll for the little girl and some Tonka trucks for the boys, the secret Santas, once home,  tiptoed through the gravel-covered back alley between the houses, opening the gate carefully trying not to make it creak and put the gifts, wrapped in red and green with pictures of Santa tied with ribbons of blue and red satin and laid them on the back steps of their neighbor’s house.

If the children asked how they got there, the excuse would be that Santa would be unable to fit into the small chimney, or worse, because of his big belly, he might fall off the sloped roof, so the gifts were left outside. Their own children would run over early to make sure their friends got up and out the door, excited and delighted by the bounty in the backyard.

​The grinning neighbors sighed, thinking this was exactly what the Christmas spirit was all about!

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Dona McIntyre spent most of her life as a Professional Singer, traveling across Canada from B.C. to Ontario and, in her later years, to Mexico. Dona now writes flash creative nonfiction, short stories, and poems and is beginning a memoir. Stocking Stuffers is one of her creative nonfiction works.