You Need To Thank The Person Gifting You Socks

Love is not the gift you want it to be.

On Christmas 1993, I was an ingrate, a bastard child who didn’t yet know the true value of socks.

Every year, as we gathered at my Aunt Millie’s brownstone, the funeral director who’d arrived in the 1940s Fort Greene to make a way for us, we got ample gifts. The Cranford Funeral Home was doing well in the late 80s, mostly because of crack addiction and bad diets and cholesterol. So we laid ribboned hearts before fresh spruce and forgot all about Jesus. The Hodges family prayed to the God of JC Penney, Santa Clause. I didn’t have to do anything except show up, fill my fat belly with Christmas ham and pineapples, and fall asleep in a livery cab on the way home. Life was good, but I was stupid.

As my Aunt M, rest her soul, popped on her red hat with the white puff, we did our best to ignore her sweaty daughter, J, gripped by cocaine and dancing and singing every time a gift was announced. My cousin D, her daughter, acted like an old lady because her grandma was raising her through the relapse tsunamis and the hurricane recoveries. D said, one day on the stoop, “I can’t wait to have a flat tire,” by which she meant, enough belly fat that she could sit her boobs right on top of her tube-like stomach. But she was 11, so her tire hadn’t come in yet.

Those days, Aunt M and Aunt Ellie and Aunt Margaret, with the stiff smile, would wrap up white Macy’s boxes and stuff them with turtlenecks, socks, underwear. All the designer stuff. Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein on my waist and ass. Nike and Adidas on my floppy size eight feet. They were helping my mom feed and clothe me, a Yule at a time.

I would open them and feint a smile because I hated clothes. I needed that Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis. It seemed like every day of fourth grade, somebody would come out to the lunch table with a new tip on how to beat a Sonic level or nitro-boost Super Mario.

“OOH but when you get to Bowser, you gotta double jump mad hard yo!” And then they’d mimic tap-tap-tap-tap and bust out laughing for like a million hours. I didn’t know how to give controller tips or even laugh right. I tried to laugh longer to make up for not knowing. They’d look at me like “Why you laughing when you ain’t got a system?” So I pressed my mom for a Super Nintendo, winter ‘94, when those Japanese wizards of the video game era were peaking.

After we got home from Aunt M’s place on Lafayette, I skulked around sullen.

“You don’t like your gifts? Plenty children didn’t get nuttin’ today you know. Oh.” And my mom whooshed off down the hall. Then I noticed a perfectly wrapped shoebox-size present that hadn’t been there when we left for dinner. Under our silver synthetic tree that played Jingle Bell Rock til I couldn’t sleep. “From: Mom, To: Andrew.”

“What’s this?”

“If you don’t like this one, you can always return it. I’d gladly—”

I ripped it open before she could finish such a heinous thought. It was a Super Nintendo, grey box with the purple “on” button and space for a cartridge. She had wrapped up a small game, Shaq Fu, so I could test it. That was the only game I ever played. I wasn’t good at it, felt too embarrassed to practice with friends who were two and three years into their Nintendo degrees, and otherwise felt less than competitive when I’d lose a level and simply dismiss this 300-dollar toy as if it were never there.

The real gift of that year and many years before and after: socks. My mom and aunts and grandma got me so many socks. Like I said, I was an ungrateful little heathen who tore through them looking for other bounty, VHS tapes of Aladdin, cards with money or checks, candy. I was like a little fiend heading to a pawn shop, the transience of my items no more important than their initial retail value. But what socks did for me, no one could question.

Freshman year of college, 9 months before I dropped out, I went back to Atlanta — flying standby for $50 on AirTran (this was 9/11 days) — a duffel full of socks for my stinky feet. I had been hooping in these stupid Nike foams that gave me athlete’s foot from their cheap construction and my inability to take care of myself in even the most basic ways. My whole room smelled of the vomitous ambrosia only some funky toe sweat can produce.

About a decade later, I was back in the South, the low-country, pretty broke and house-sitting for a friend who, in exchange, didn’t make me pay rent while I got back on my feet. It was my first Christmas truly away from home, no money for that 24-hour one-way bus back North. My mother sent me cash in an envelope and twenty pairs of socks. Merry Christmas on a card. I bawled alone in a row house over some bad Chinese food. It was sweetness laid over that salty mess.

Even today, when gifts are more ceremony than expense, my heart fills with joy over the packs of black Hanes socks awaiting me at my mom’s house. Where we used to spend the late night of Christmas Eve wrapping, now we just exchange gift bags. She doesn’t take the price stickers off anymore. I wanted to redo the past so I wrapped my gifts and added mesh to the little paper bags for porting them. Some tape. This small effort, my late and reluctant awareness of her hard work, her steadiness, will not ever match 30 years of fresh socks. Imagine never having to think about socks because you’ve been mothered that well. Imagine knowing someone loves you enough to keep your feet warm when it’s cold. Imagine how her feet ached those nights when her hosiery ripped and ground a stubborn friction into her big toe. Stop being too good for a lifetime of socks. Get someone you love some socks.