Christmas Jars Read online

  Five

  ~

  Hope spent most of Christmas Day at the newspaper, assuring another workaholic colleague that her break-in did not make her a high-risk kidnapping target. Together they theorized on who might have reacted with such breakneck speed and left the generous—and very bizarre—gift.

  The next morning she took the jar to the bank, cashed in the change, and stopped at a hardware store to buy a small but sturdy steel personal safe. She also purchased a twelve-inch television set and stopped by an insurance office to arrange for a no-frills renter’s insurance policy. Then she drove back to the newspaper, with the jar still firmly planted at the front of her never-resting mind.

  That afternoon Hope was reminded of a hard deadline approaching for a series of articles on the pros and cons of an upcoming bond referendum for public financing of a new county prison complex. There was tangible pressure to make progress on at least the first of the three pieces, but nothing could pry her mind from the jar. Where had it come from? Whose money was it? Was she to spend it? Save it? Pass it on to someone more needy? Above all else, why had she been chosen? Certainly there were others, countless others, more needy than she was.

  Putting the prison assignment aside, Hope searched the paper’s archive database for the words Christmas and Jar. To her amazement, she found three letters to the editor in recent years that all told similarly mysterious stories. Each was, in essence, a thank-you note to some anonymous benefactor.

  “My name is Kimberly Telford,” the first letter began, “and I owe someone the biggest thank-you of my life. No one beyond my husband and doctor knows this, but in early December I suffered my third consecutive miscarriage.”

  The letter detailed the woman’s depression leading up to Christmas and then the subsequent discovery of a jar full of change on her front step on December twenty-fourth. The money, almost four hundred dollars, went toward fertility treatments that her insurance company refused to cover. She and her husband had been trying unsuccessfully for five years for the baby that he believed would finally make their marriage complete. Her husband said over and over that only a baby boy would make their relationship “relevant in the eternities,” as he put it. Her doctors believed the intense anxiety and stress were the primary factors preventing a viable pregnancy.

  The near-nonstop fighting created uncertainty about where their lives might lead them, if anywhere at all. At her lowest, the woman realized her marriage had morphed into two single adults living together, roommates, no longer as a couple, and no longer as two people with one cause.

  It was then, with her husband fast asleep in the bedroom and Kimberly’s soul teetering on the brink of giving up, that a knock on the door startled her. She wiped her eyes and nose and went to her front door. At her feet was the jar, wrapped in a gold ribbon and full of cash and change. “It wasn’t what I pulled from the jar that helped most,” Kimberly’s letter concluded. “It was what you put inside. Thank you for telling me that I am not alone. I am not alone!”

  Hope’s eyes rested on the last lines for an extra moment before scrolling down to the second letter.

  “Some holidays are better than others,” the next letter began. “But this year will be hard to top.” The letter was signed by a local college student and aspiring chemist John Willard. He’d been sitting at a bus stop on Christmas Eve, when two children—eight or nine years old, he judged—handed him a jar packed to the lid with nothing but quarters. John, away from his family for the first time, was en route to the college library. “But really,” the letter disclosed, “I was running from the sadness of being away from Mom and Dad and the family farm I was born on.”

  He took the jar, thanked the children, and smiled as they raced each other around a corner, out of sight, but forever into the rich creases of John’s mind. He sat frozen on the bench for some time after, staring into a snow bank.

  A honking city bus startled him, the letter explained, and he motioned for it to pass without him. With the jar secured tightly in both hands, he walked the streets near his dorm until he found another lonely wanderer. The student, also a young man, was thousands of miles from his father and best friend in Mexico City. He carried not a jar but a mesh duffel bag of dirty laundry. John offered to buy the two of them dinner at the nicest restaurant they could find. They sat and talked for hours, comparing childhood mischief and drinking three mugs each of the best hot chocolate either had ever tasted. They became fast friends and together enjoyed a Christmas Eve whose spirit would last a lifetime. The two would pass the tradition along, filling jars of their own and never again looking through the people they encountered each day. John’s letter ended: “Thank you for seeing me.”

  The third letter, addressed to “Our Angel,” was from a married woman and high-school dropout. A. J. Francis was born and raised on the south side of the tracks. She and her husband, a childhood sweetheart, had once again fallen behind on their utilities. She suffered through several days of cold weather, with a toddler at home and a husband who worked as a long-haul truck driver. The nearly three hundred dollars in her Christmas jar allowed the gas to be restored immediately. But, more importantly, it instilled in her a new and very strong desire to spend money differently. “I will never see my baby shivering again,” the letter said. It went on to describe meeting her husband at the door four days after Christmas with a pen and paper in hand. Together they created a budget so that never again would the lights or the heat or the phone be taken away. “To our angel,” she wrote, “you have made my life better. You gave me the one last chance I have been praying for, and I won’t let you down.”

  Hope felt intrigue swirling from her stomach to the hair on the back of her neck. Where had this tradition begun? How widespread was it? How many jars were in circulation? She was familiar with all sorts of holiday goodwill. There were cookies in mailboxes, driveways being shoveled, and volunteers ringing bells outside every grocery store in America so that clothes, food, and medicine could be purchased for the needy.

  But Hope knew this Christmas Jar tradition was unique, so unorganized and so seemingly random. There were no sponsors; there was no one to take the much-deserved credit. There was just a collection of nameless, faceless good Samaritans.

  She elected—without even a moment of serious inner debate—to spend a day visiting each of the Christmas Jar families. She would present herself both as a representative of the newspaper and as a recipient of a jar herself.

  Using resources from the paper and calling in favors she’d accrued over several years of playing back-scratching games, Hope obtained phone numbers and addresses for all three. Her first was a surprise visit to A. J., now living in a warm, middle-class apartment complex with a clean swimming pool and a security gate. The brave woman, who just a few years before was struggling to keep her heat on, was now graduating from cosmetology school. Much to Hope’s surprise, A. J. was unwilling to provide many details beyond what Hope already knew from the letter in the paper. She refused to speculate on who might have left the jar and confessed to never having investigated.

  When asked about being quoted for Hope’s forthcoming article, A. J. responded resolutely, “Darlin’, this ain’t about gettin’ credit. This just don’t belong in the papers.”

  The refrain was similar at the other two stops. Neither had any idea of the jar’s origin; none had petitioned beforehand for help from neighbors or churches. All were proud, a little embarrassed, and immeasurably grateful. Each of their lives had improved in ways they could not yet calculate.

  In each home, Hope spotted Christmas Jars of their own. One was inconspicuously placed behind a toaster, another high and far back on the refrigerator, and the other partially hidden by a grizzly bear cookie jar. She assumed they were passing the tradition along, but given how little each was willing to share about receiving their own jars, she chose not to waste time pressing for more.

  Six

  ~

  Stymied and falling behind at the paper, Hope
needed to refocus. She relegated the story to spinning deep in her newspaper reporter gears. Two or three times a week she emptied the change from her pockets into an empty dill pickle jar in her kitchen. More than once she considered pitching the experience as a human-interest feature, but knew that without more concrete details it would never fly.

  Hope waited. She knew another Christmas would come and, in all probability, so too another round of jars. She would wait for another letter to be printed in the Daily Recordand pounce. The next time she would investigate deeper, be less forthcoming if that’s what it took, and uncover the inspiration and front-page story she knew were hiding just beneath the surface.

  On a winter-cool March Saturday morning, Hope learned that a full year of impatience wouldn’t be necessary. Another open thank-you letter was printed on page A8.

  “Typical me,” the letter began. “My wife always handled this sort of thing.” Mr. Shane Oaks was a father of five. After she suffered a debilitating nervous breakdown, his wife had moved across the country to live with extended family and seek professional care. He wrote the letter January fourth and addressed the envelope that same afternoon, but then somehow buried it in an inside pocket of his heavy jacket. It had lain there, unremembered for two months.

  The detailed letter chronicled perhaps his most meaningful Christmas Eve ever. The forty-three-year-old man awoke early and ventured into the biting cold to retrieve the morning paper yet again from the bushes along the front of his house. “But I don’t blame him for his terrible aim,” he wrote of the young carrier who delivered papers each morning before school. “He’s a real hard worker. I admire that.

  “I opened the door,” the letter wove on, “fetched the paper, and when I turned to step back inside my home, noticed a jar full of money sitting on the floor by my crashed-on-the-couch son.” The letter continued and explained that after breakfast, Shane and his children counted over five hundred dollars in cash and change. The money allowed him to sneak out later on Christmas Eve to the only store still open and buy a few small gifts for his children. The unexpectedly enormous costs of daycare had decimated his plans for much of a holiday.

  “I need you to know that I did not spend it all,” he wrote, “just enough to add color to my children’s Christmas morning.” The letter stated that the balance of the money would go toward beginner books for the youngest, groceries, and badly needed school supplies.

  “Thank you, whoever you are, for the generous jar and the lesson it taught us. The money did not save my life,” the letter ended, “but it did save my faith in men.”

  Hope took her feet and jogged across the room, grabbed a phone book under the receptionist’s desk, and blazed across the parking lot to her car. Within forty-five minutes she was knocking on Mr. Oaks’s front door.

  He welcomed her in, and in rapid-fire fashion she shared her own experience and the few details she’d gleaned from the other families. “What do you think the common thread is?” she asked. “Do you think it’s someone you know? Or is it someone who from a distance saw your plight and felt pity and gave what they could?”

  “I have no idea,” he answered, apparently to all her questions at once. “But I’m so grateful, so very grateful,” he repeated, and though he wanted to respect the giver’s anonymity, he admitted to having a hunch.

  “My oldest is a night owl.” The man’s cadence suggested experience weaving good bedtime stories. “Sometimes he comes downstairs with all the lights off and just sits. He says he meditates, but I think he talks to his mother. Either way, I allow it. Just as long as he’s not a zombie at school and keeps his head together. He’s my right arm, you know.”

  “Sounds like a sweet kid.” Hope knew all about talking to a faraway mother. She’d been doing it for months.

  “So Noah, my son, is sitting quietly in my chair when he hears footsteps outside. He got on all fours and crawled to the window and saw two figures tiptoeing on the porch and leaving something on the step at the door.”

  “What time was that?” Hope’s reporter juices were at full flow.

  “Late. Probably two o’clock, somewhere around there.”

  “Interesting.” Hope scribbled indecipherable notes on her pad.

  “They left the jar wrapped in a towel and hustled back to the sidewalk and around the corner. Noah brought the jar inside, set it on the floor next to him, and eventually fell asleep where he lay.”

  “Do you have the towel? May I see it?”

  “Why not?” He left the room and returned a few seconds later. The hand towel featured twelve drummers, using red-and-white candy canes as drumsticks. “It’s really nice,” Hope offered. “Handmade, I bet.”

  “If you say so.”

  “OK, this is good. This is very good.” Hope felt like a cub reporter on the verge of breaking the story of the year. “So who do you think it was? Who does your son think it was? Any ideas?”

  “To be honest, I don’t think they want us playing Sherlock Holmes with this. I’m sure they didn’t expect my seventeen-year-old to be watching through a slit in the drapes.”

  “Understood.” She needed to assure him that she would handle his disclosures with care. “But this is such an amazing story, such a meaningful thing these folks are doing. If the paper agrees to run my story, think of the good it could do.”

  “I don’t know.” He wriggled. “I’ve probably said too much already.”

  Her response was comfortably rehearsed. “Sir, my paper spends half its ink, probably more, reporting the countless ills of the world, reporting on every page stories of human weakness. As someone in the business I get pretty worn out by it all. Don’t you?”

  “I’ve lived it. Lived my share. I know . . .”

  “I am sorry, I am, I just think there is so little . . . so little positive news out there, that we should expose . . . no, I mean showcase the good whenever we can. We can remind people that there is plenty of charity in the world, and in our city.”

  Maybe Mom was right,she thought. I could be a politician with that knack for spin.

  She let the sermon hang for a moment. “Sir?”

  “Of course we don’t know for certain, but Noah’s pretty sure they live a few streets over. They’re twin girls, and I expect he thinks they’re worth looking at, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, I see.” Hope pursed her lips playfully.

  “Their parents run a furniture repair business or something in their garage. We’ve seen the girls come and go from there quite a lot.”

  “Thank you!” She was ready again with her spiraled notepad. “So you know their names?”

  “No. But my wife probably did.” His voice trailed off.

  “This is rough for you. The holiday must be difficult—”

  “It’s fine,” he interrupted. “We’re all right. But thank you.”

  She imagined his letter in the paper would generate more than his share of pity.

  “I can tell you what house it is, but remember, we’re just guessing here.” He drew her a map on a pink piece of paper from a strawberry-scented notepad. “And you didn’t hear this from me, got it?”

  “Of course.” Hope’s story of the Christmas Jar—her front-page feature—was practically writing itself.

  ~

  Hope sat for ninety minutes in a neighborhood pancake house, reevaluating and retooling her approach. With one hand she scribbled notes on a pad. With the other she dipped French fries into a sauce she’d concocted of two parts ketchup, two parts mayonnaise, and a small squirt of mustard. All three previous visits to Christmas Jar families had yielded so little information, until this evening. This will be the story that makes me.

  The decision to play loose with the truth was made so quickly, and with so little reflection, that it surprised even Hope. She coated her last fry in the pinkish sauce and dropped it in her mouth.

  This isn’t just about a story, she justified, it’s about saying thank you to a legion of angels.

  Seven<
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  ~

  Hope rolled up to 316 Oakliegh Hill, stopped the car, and breathed deeply for thirty seconds, just the way her mother had taught. She surveyed the property and noticed the converted two-car garage. A wide single rolling door was shut, and the words “Restored, Inc.” were painted in tall white letters on a golden oval background above the door. She stepped out of her car and walked with purpose down the sidewalk and up the stairs to the spacious porch. Individually carved capital block letters were screwed into the brick above the polished handworked wooden front door: “MAXWELL.”

  Hope knocked.

  After an unusually long wait, an attractive woman—probably in her mid-forties, Hope judged—appeared with an inviting smile.

  “Good evening, ma’am. My name is Hope Jensen. I’m a college student, a senior actually, and I wonder if I could ask a few questions about your furniture business for a project I’m doing.” The words flowed easily, like a seasoned sales pitch.

  “I suppose so.” The woman’s voice was as pleasant as her soft, youthful face.

  “Thank you.” Hope stepped through the door. I’m in.

  The woman left her standing in the foyer and vanished around the corner. She returned, again after an uncomfortably long wait, with a man Hope assumed was her husband. He was salt-and-pepper gray, but mostly salt. His chin and nose were large and distinguished but not distracting. His eyes were wood-paneling brown.

  “Hello.” Hope stuck her hand out.

  “Hi there,” he answered, firmly taking her hand but just holding it more than shaking it.

  He and his wife led Hope into the adjoining living room, where he sat down on a worn brown cloth recliner. “My wife says you’re curious about our furniture operation here.” He worked his back and lower body side to side into the crease of the chair until he looked comfortable.

  “Operation?” Hope asked.