Know All Ye By These Presents

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: What is the most life-changing holiday gift you’ve ever gotten?

First, let’s go back. Have you watched Magpie Murders on PBS?

It is one of the best things I have ever seen on television, ever ever ever. Everything about it is spectacular: the writing, the production, the direction, the set design, everything everything .

(And I know Hallie agrees, she and I had lunch the other day! In a restaurant! Together! In real life! And it was marvelous and wonderful and lovely, and we talked about so many things, but one was Magpie Murders, which we both adore.) 

Not to mention the author of the novel, and the script writer of the TV show, Anthony Horowitz, who is a total and complete genius in every way.

Anyway, I interviewed him this week for A Mighty Blaze, and he was of course, a total and complete genius. And utterly charming.

Anyway. What happened was that in the green room before the interview we were talking about the holidays, and holiday gifts, and he said that one of his most life-changing gifts came when he was about nine.

He came downstairs, he said, on Christmas morning to find that he had been given a bicycle bell. You know, a little “ching-ching ching-ching” bell that is supposed to go on the handlebars of a bicycIe.

Well, he confessed, he completely freaked out. He went crazy. He was so unhappy, and just lost it. Wailing. That’s all he got? ? After his parents comforted him, they took him outside to see the… Well, of course, you guessed it.

Bicycle.

Which really is so touching, isn’t it? Poor adorable little nine-year-old Anthony Horowitz, who did not understand that it was a teaser.

It was so sweet, and I said to him, “Plot twist! Your first plot twist !”

And he actually laughed. Which was very gratifying.

My life-changing gift was from my stepfather, who didn’t quite know how to handle preteen me, but who, one Christmas, apparently utterly baffled about why I would have cut my hair in a Sassoon (I did it myself in the bathroom), gave me a legal looking document, from Santa Clause – – this was maybe in 1964, seriously.

It said “Know all ye by these presents” – – get it, presents? And it went on and on with whereas, and in so far as and in as much as which , and ended up being a certificate for three professional haircuts.

There is a lot to unpack there, about criticism and control. but we just won’t do that. And it was the sweetest thing for someone who was so – – had so much trouble with emotion. Adorable.

What about you Reds and Readers , what present did you ever get that was memorable?

RHYS BOWEN: I had the same sort of experience, Hank. I was eighteen, in my first year of college. My dear friend was getting married in Germany at Christmas time and instead of presents I asked the family all to chip in to pay for my ticket to attend her wedding. So I wasn’t expecting any big presents. However… transistor radios had just come on the market (yes, I’m that old) and other girls at college had them. I had told my parents about these wonders and how I’d try to save up for one when I could work during the next vacation.

At Christmas Santa left our gifts in a pillow case at the bottom of our beds. I got up at first light and went through mine, finding the usual sort of things–chocolates, a book I’d wanted, warm socks…and then I came upon a battery. What on earth would I need a battery for? I had nothing that worked with a nine volt…. And then I thought “No, it couldn’t be. Not possible. “ I searched and there, at the very bottom of the pillow case, was my transistor radio. 

This was all the more special because my parents were not rich. My brother was at a private school. They were paying for my college. Money was tight. And yet my soft-hearted father had gone out and bought my transistor radio. I still get that glow when I think of it.

And I’ve tried to replicate with my own children. The Christmas when Phantom of the Opera came to town I managed to get seats for them and sent each of them a fancy invitation saying “You are invited to an evening of music and mayhem. It was signed “The Phantom.”

Watching their faces as they read and understood was priceless.!

JENN McKINLAY: I was fourteen and my Aunt Nancy gave me a navy blue leather journal with silver embellishments and a fancy pen to go with it. I didn’t even know I wanted to be a writer yet, but I was always a storyteller (much like her) and I think she knew it was what I was destined to be. She passed away last week and it’s been a blow to the family to lose our 91-year-old matriarch but I still have that journal and all the goopy stuff I wrote in it. And I became a writer in large part to her, I think.

LUCY BURDETTE: Rhys, I can remember getting a transistor radio as well, to share with my sister. We hunkered down in our basement bedroom for hours, listening to that radio. It was the era of Red Rubber Ball. Remember that song? It’s an earworm for sure! The first Christmas I was going out with John, I told him that my family was big on Christmas. So he came through in a big way with stuffed animals and Lord knows what else. I knew he was a keeper.

HALLIE EPHRON: I hope this isn’t a personality test, because although I got a ton of presents every Christmas, the ones I remember best were the clunkers.

There was a tan suede carcoat (remember those?) with dark stitching around the pockets and leather buttons. It was so stiff that it could stand up on its own. I’m sure I’d asked for a leather coat, meaning a bomber jacket.

And there was a copy of Virginia Woolf’s A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN that my mother, always hopeful that I’d become a writer like she was (instead of the teacher I yearned to be), gave me when I was about 15. I tried to read it. Really I did. But it was not until decades later when I listened to it as an audio book that I got some idea of what VW was going on about. In the same vein, she gave me diary notebooks. Invariably I’d write a page or two and lose the key.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: When I was thirteen, I got the most memorable Christmas gift ever, and I’m still not sure why it sticks in my mind so. It was a large plastic bottle of some intensely lemony cologne, with enough alcohol to feel cool and tingly when I put it on. Maybe it was the acknowledgement I was growing up? My mother always wore perfume - Joy - so I associated wearing scent with womanhood. I can vividly bring back sitting in the boucle green chair in the living room - the chair that now lives in my office! - sniffing the heady lemon scent and reading from my other, annual favorite gift: a grocery sack full of used books. Heaven!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: So funny the things that stick in your memory! A set of pop beads when I was about five–I was so thrilled. The giant box of crayons. (The train set that Santa never brought…) 

But one gift that might have been life changing, or at least contributing, was the hardcover boxed set of J.R.R. Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS my parents gave me the Christmas I was fourteen. I still have them, and they are still the most gorgeous books. I have the dust jackets, too, but they need to be put in mylar and somehow I never manage to get around to it. I think that set really cemented my love affair with books. And it certainly started my love of maps in books!

HANK: These stories are great! Julia–was it Jean Naté? And yes, Lucy, Red Rubber Ball by The Cyrkle! (and now I am singing...)

How about you, readers? Tell us about a memorable gift!