Looking back, it was the best Christmas I had as a child. It was the year my sister and I bought my parents bicycles and the year I learned about giving. I was 10 and my sister was 12. My sister, who was and still is the organized one of the family, had the idea of buying our parents bicycles for Christmas. It was May and we had about seven months to save our allowance along with any other money we could earn. Every Monday we would sneak off to our bedroom, my sister would crawl under her bed and come out with an old cigar box, where we hid the money we were saving. We would put in all the money we could come up with for that week. Being the oldest, my sister would carefully count the money and write it down in a note book that was kept in the box. At first we each put in half of our two dollar a week allowance. By mid–August my sister said we were not going to have enough money to buy the bicycles, so reluctantly I put in my whole allowance. In October we were still not going to have enough saved to buy the bicycles. “We have to start putting in half of our lunch money too,” my sister informed me, after counting the money.

“You’re going to starve me to death,” I cried. I was all for the idea of getting our parents the great gift and sacrificing my allowance was not too hard, but my lunch money—was my lunch money! This was more than I could take. She eventually persuaded me to give in and I began putting in half of my lunch money along with my whole allowance. The more we saved and the closer it came to Christmas, the more excited I became. “I can hardly wait to see mom and dads faces when we give them the bicycles. I’m glad you made me put in the extra money,” I told my sister one night as we lay in bed talking about surprising our parents.

About the end of October we started searching the newspaper sale ads, we were looking for the perfect pair of matching bicycles that were in our price range. We had one problem, when we did find them, how were we going to get there, buy them and bring them home. We decided to let our grandparents in on our secret. Partly to get their help and partly because we were so excited we just had to tell someone.

Thanksgiving came and with it brought the after Thanksgiving sale ads. We found bicycles we could afford at Kmart and arranged for our grandmother to take us to Fresno and buy them, that next Friday. I think that day was as memorable as Christmas. We shared our excitement with my grandparents and they became part of our grand scheme. Our grandmother made up a reason for my sister and I to spend the day with her. We arrived at our grandmothers with the old cigar box, which was pretty worn by this time, in it was two-hundred dollars worth of one dollar bills, quarters, dimes, nickels and a few pennies. Our grandmother took one look at the box of money and suggested we go to the bank and change it for larger bills. I remember our grandfather as a nervous, excitable kind of guy that never was a very good driver. He ran a stop sign on the way to the bank and cut off at least two other cars. Suddenly he realized that we couldn’t go to the bank my mother worked at and made an illegal u-turn in the middle of the street, in order to go to the only other bank in town. We finally made it there, got our money exchanged and made it back to our grandparent’s house. Luckily, we lived in a small town with not much traffic and where everyone knew our grandfather and how bad of a driver he was. To my relief, our grandmother drove us to Fresno, where the nearest Kmart was located. We picked out two dark green bicycles, a men’s bike for my dad and a matching woman’s bike for my mother. We had enough money to purchase the bicycles and a little left over to buy two big red bows. “I am very proud of you two girls,” our grandmother told us on the way home. “You’ve are both very caring and giving.”

“Thanks, but it was really Cindy’s idea, I just helped with the money,” I confessed. But I felt pretty good about my part, just the same.

We celebrated Christmas with my grandparents on Christmas Eve every year and it was during that time when we received our gifts from Santa. My sister and I were told that with all the places Santa had to go, he needed to start early and we were on the early list. Every year on Christmas Eve, we would eat dinner and then go for a ride around town to look at the lights, when we returned Santa would have came to our house. For some reason it took so long for all the adults to get in the car. It seemed someone always had to go to the bathroom or forgot something they had to go back into the house and get. This year was different; we knew why our grandfather had to run back into the house while everyone waited in the car. We had employed him to set out the bicycles and we were to keep our parents from going back into the house. As in all the years before, we couldn’t wait for our sight seeing trip to be over, however it was for a different reason. When we came home there were two new bicycles waiting for my parents. They were so surprised, my mother cried and my dad was just in shock. “You girls did this by yourselves?” our dad asked for the third time. They could hardly believe we had saved and bought the bicycles.

I think back and I can still feel myself smiling, we were so happy and proud of ourselves. With all the excitement I hardly even thought about what I had received for Christmas. It didn’t seem to be as important as it had been in previous years, when I couldn’t wait to open presents. Something was different that year and it would change how I felt about Christmas forever.