Have you ever been given a Christmas gift as a child that has stuck with you for a lifetime?
Because I have.
Now, for some background, I grew up in a tiny country town in the middle of Australia.
Christmas day was always over 45 C and was spent with my parents enjoying good food and better company.
The day was never fancy; we didn’t have a lot of money growing up, but we always spent the time trying to focus on the things that mattered most—winning our annual Christmas card game competition.
Now, I was always the child who was determined to catch Santa Claus, and I went to extreme lengths to do it. One year, I even tried tying string from the door, to my stocking to my fingers so I would wake up if someone came in my room.
Unsurprisingly, I never caught him.
While I’m confessing my secrets, I was also the kid who wrote a letter to Santa to convince him I was a well-behaved child. But as the overachiever that I was, I’d try so hard to convince him that every year (for longer than I care to admit) that I would write down every bad thing I did that year to try and prove that in the scheme of things—I was actually relatively well behaved.
Essentially, I just outed myself to the big guy and confessed my wrongdoing to two people who probably had no idea about half of my child crimes—like throwing my half-eaten sandwiches out the window so I could get a sweet treat.
I laugh about it now, but I am still mortified.
Now, back to the story. One year, while trying to catch Santa as a nine-year-old, I woke up in the early hours of the morning devastated to see my stocking was empty … but instead, there was a note on my door.
I’d been given a scavenger hunt to find my Christmas presents from Santa. After finding two hula-hoops hidden in the house, the last gift was said to be hidden in a place with lots of light.
When I tell you I looked under every light in our house, I mean it—but it was nowhere to be found.
Eventually, at around 4 a.m. I gave up and sat on the couch, staring at our Christmas tree in defeat; it was then that I saw a tiny little box on the tree branch hidden between some lights.
Inside was a tiny pair of sapphire earrings. I was mesmerized.
Standing in front of the coloured lights of the tree, I put in the earrings, and I remember feeling like the luckiest girl in the world.
As I write this now, 20 years later, wearing the same pair of tiny blue earrings, I think back to that little girl who tried to catch Santa Claus and instead found her favourite childhood Christmas gift.
