No Christmas :: essays research papers

When Christmas Couldnt ComeWe lived in the farmhouse until my dad lost his job in 1994. No interminable able to afford a mortgage, let alone utilities in the old, drafty house we moved into a smaller house two doors down. My mom called the new-fashioned house cozy making the best of a situation I couldnt begin to understand words like WIC, welfare and debt bastardlyt nothing to me at the time. I missed the barn that longed to be explored, the hill where at eight, I saw my first snowfall and of course, my room. The new house wasnt mine, it was Mirandas, a whiz who moved away, my room wasnt mine, it was hers. My mind raced with thousands of questions, all of them pitying myself, feeling bad for Andrea, forgetting about my family, all of them until my mom told the four of us that Christmas couldnt stick that year. The words fell out of my moms mouth like hail from a winter sky, pelting me in the face, stinging my entire body. What did she mean Christmas couldnt come, that we coul d no longer afford any extras, that things were going to be different? Instantly my eyes swelled with things unfamiliar to a tomboy, my heart raced my trim breath as I struggled to empathize with my parents, searching for a question, an answer, something to make it better.Before that November day I neer thought about money or affording things I grew up in a upper-middle class family where eating out was a commonality, vacations were assumed and for all I knew money could have grown on tress. I was eleven, self-absorbed in wants and wishes where the new house was a drag not more affordable and sharing a room was suffocating, not compromising. Life, for me, had never consisted in cutting corners or working to make ends meet, I simply lived getting what I wanted, not what I needed.Only after that conversation with my