Op-Ed Columns

(It is hard to think of a new column every Christmas. Or maybe I’m just too lazy. But a few folks have told me they liked this one, and since it has been a few years since it was published I thought I’d run it again. Hope your days are merry and bright.)

Come Christmas, I always think of Taddy.

Tadeusz Klarrman was too much for the Southern tongue. So that’s what we called him.

He arrived in our little town sometime in 1951. They, the grownups, put him in the 6th grade. By early 1952 he was gone, and today, to me, he would be just another fading picture in an old yearbook. If it weren’t for Christmas.

They, the grownups, told us Taddy was a refugee. They didn’t tell us much more. Imagination supplied the rest, put together a story of how, at the end of World War II, Taddy and his family were caught behind the Iron Curtain. Then, in the confusion and chaos of postwar Europe, they made it across the border and became DPs — Displaced Persons. Sticking together, the Klarrmans survived the camps, found an American sponsor, crossed the ocean, and one day arrived in Grove Hill, Alabama.

Since he was a few years older than me, I never really got to know him, never played with him, don’t know if we ever spoke. All I remember is him riding around town on an old bicycle, alone.

And the story my parents told me.

It began with his class Christmas party.

Students in each room drew names for gift-giving.

They don’t do that anymore, which is good. It wasn’t fun. The teachers meant well, wanted everyone to have a gift, but as soon as the names went into the box we started worrying about who would draw whom and what sort of gifts we would give and get. The options contained all the social horrors that the adolescent mind could conceive.

Gifts, even those arbitrarily given, are filled with important implications.

If you drew the name of a popular girl or boy, you had better come up with a worthy gift or you would be relegated to such a lowly place in the schoolyard pecking order that whoever drew your name next Christmas would give you socks — which was about as low as you could go, gift-wise. A nice gift for a girl might mean you “liked" her, while an inappropriate gift could nip a budding romance in the bud. And so on and so on.

No, name-drawing wasn’t fun.

Especially for poor kids.

I grew up among folks who didn’t have much. Today, people look back through rose-tinted glasses and talk about being poor but not knowing it. These children knew it. They were the ones who spent the year collecting the tinfoil from discarded cigarette packages to make shiny balls to decorate their Christmas tree because they could not afford the store-bought kind. It was all their parents could do to buy a Christmas gift for their own children, much less someone else’s. Name-drawing reminded them, and us, of their situation.

Taddy’s family fell into that category.

Now, I don’t know exactly what transpired, whether Taddy came home with the name he had drawn, tried to explain what all the name-drawing was about, got told there was no money for that sort of thing, and how the word of it got back to Mr. Brady, but it did.

Mr. Brady owned a hardware store, which during the Christmas season he magically converted into a toyshop. Hammers, saws and such were pushed off to one side so all the delights of childhood could be displayed. Every day after school my friends and I would drop by to see what new wonders had arrived and to stare at the stack of two-gun, double-holster, cap-pistol sets that were on all our Christmas lists.

I was probably thinking about those guns when my parents told me what happened.

Somehow, Mr. Brady had learned of Taddy’s situation. So he went and got him and took him to his store and told him to pick out whatever he wanted to give the name he had drawn. And Taddy went straight over to the two-gun, double-holster, cap-pistol set and said “This."

And how Mr. Brady wrapped it and handed it to him.

(And I thought how lucky was the kid whose name was on that slip of paper.)

But that wasn’t the end of the story.

Then Mr. Brady told Taddy, “Now you pick out the gift that you would like to have." And Taddy went over and picked up another two-gun, double-holster, cap-pistol set.

And I knew what my parents were telling me. Taddy was what Christmas was, or should be, all about. At Christmas we should give what we, ourselves, treasure most.

Now, that happened a long time ago.

I don’t know what became of the Klarrmans after they left. I hope they lived out the American dream.

But I know this, come Christmas, I always think of Taddy.