When I think of my mom’s family, I think of the Christmas party they held on the third Sunday of every December, and, more specifically, of the white elephant gift exchange that became, over the years, the party’s most important feature. Participants in the exchange included my cousins, my aunts and uncles, and my grandpa. Also my grandma, until a massive stroke left her unable to speak or easily move on her own. Even after that, though, she maintained a presence at the gift exchange, silently presiding over the festivities from the comfort of her green leather recliner.
          It was the most important family event of the year, and this is how it worked:
          Each participant brought one wrapped gift, which was assigned a number by my Aunt Carol (my mom is one of seven children), famed throughout the family for her scrupulous organizational skills. (We later learned that these skills allowed her to successfully embezzle much of my grandparents’ income during their retirement years. At the time, she told us she was just helping them with their taxes, and the whole thing would have stayed a secret forever if she hadn’t kept meticulous records of her years of theft in a bankers box under her bed which her children found after she died. In the end, I guess her attention to detail cut both ways).
          From there, beginning with the oldest guest at the party and moving backward in seniority, every participant drew a number from an old, cracked fishbowl, and then Aunt Carol would distribute the gifts accordingly. Once the gifts were unwrapped, we were each allowed to initiate up to three exchanges with anyone holding a gift. The only official exception to this rule was that you couldn’t trade back for a present that had just been taken from you. This was the rule that really made things interesting, that really hurt a lot of feelings over the years.
          Of course, several unofficial rules also existed.
          One pertained to my Uncle Charlie. As a young man he had been in and out of prison, always as an accomplice to a crime, never as the principal perpetrator, which my aunts and uncles were quick to point out was no surprise, as Charlie had never shown much initiative as a kid.
          Anyway, he played by his own special rule within the gift exchange not because we saw him as some dangerous ex-con—clearly he wasn’t—but because he harbored a belief that he was and always had been the most persecuted member of the family—the one always getting yelled at by their mom, the one always being left behind at gas stations, the one always excluded from intra-family communication. It was a rare family gathering that didn’t include at least one yelling/crying confrontation between Charlie and some unlucky relative.
          With this in mind, we were all very careful of Uncle Charlie during the gift exchange. If one of us requested he surrender his gift, and it was a gift he wanted to hang onto, he would muster up a faux-brave smile, and in his most passive-aggressive tone say, “Well, I guess it’s the rules,” which was our cue to come up with an excuse, tell him we had changed our mind, that he could keep his gift. Otherwise, we knew we would find ourself on the receiving end of one of Uncle Charlie’s tantrums.
          Another regular exception was my older brother Nick, from the ages of fifteen to nineteen. The Nick exception only played with female cousins over the age of twelve and my now former Aunt Shauna. Stunned by the not-quite-incestuous proximity of Nick’s undeniable beauty, the aforementioned participants might retract a demand for a gift if Nick gave just the slightest hint of unwillingness to part with whatever he held in his hands.
          (I should clarify that specific age range I mentioned: Nick’s remarkable good looks didn’t go away at nineteen, but Nick did, leaving the family behind and requesting that none of us try to communicate with him. I think I saw him at my mom’s funeral a few years ago, but I can’t be sure).
          Depending on the subtleties of the emotional currents among the family members on any given year, other unique rules invariably arose, but those two I mentioned were the most consistent.
          Now, at the specific Christmas party I’m thinking of (I was ten years old), my grandma had been ill for a few years and my grandpa wasn’t doing so well either, physically or emotionally. He had developed leukemia, although I’m pretty sure nobody knew it yet. In my memories of him during this time, he’s always nursing some minor illness, something whose symptoms would not be so concerning in a younger, healthier body, but in the case of my grandpa—the rattling coughs, the viscous mucous trailing from his nose, the weary retching in the bathroom—seemed fairly alarming. Given my age at the time—nine or ten—I was both young enough to still be reflexively, viscerally frightened of the ailing elderly, and just old enough to be ashamed of that reaction. And so, because he was sick that year, and so obviously miserable, I spent the Christmas party avoiding my grandpa, and hating myself for doing it.
          But then came the white elephant gift exchange!
          Immediately after opening my gift—a bag of saltwater taffy—I scanned the presents in other people’s hands, looking for one I might want to claim. That plastic ukulele, maybe. Or that massive tin of popcorn. And then I saw it from across the room, nestled in my Aunt Julie’s hands—a wooden pocket chess set. I had recently joined my school’s chess club, more or less on a whim, and Tiffany Sansom, one of the kids I played with, had a set just like this one, and it was gorgeous.
          I made a beeline for Aunt Julie. I gave her the bag of taffy, took the chess set, and tried to be inconspicuous.
          I won’t rehash all the gory details of what happened next. Suffice it to say, I somehow misread the timer that governed the exchange period and used my third and final trade to reclaim the chess set with a full three minutes left on the clock. My cousin Colin (compulsive liar and notorious bed-wetter) demanded the chess set from me at the twenty second mark, and I ended that year’s white elephant holding a hideous polyester scarf bedecked with what I think were supposed to be pheasants.
          As the rest of my extended family alternately celebrated and complained, I found an unoccupied loveseat at the edge of the room and sat down. Kicking at the shag carpet with the heels of my shoes, I pondered what was to my ten-year-old mind the injustice of the situation. That chess set should have been mind: grubby Colin didn’t play chess at all, and even if he did, he didn’t deserve something that beautiful. Nobody did; nobody but me.
          I was so preoccupied with these miserable thoughts that I didn’t notice my grandpa approach, and when he sat down, joints creaking, I’m sure I was visibly startled, which my grandpa had the good grace to ignore.
          He wiped at his nose with a stained handkerchief and I scooted imperceptibly—I hoped—away.
          “What did you end up with?” he asked, tucking the filthy handkerchief into his pocket.
          I held up the monstrosity of a scarf that Colin had burdened me with.
          “Good for you,” said my grandpa, slapping my knee.
          I shook my head, appalled that he couldn’t recognize the tragedy of my situation.
          “It’s a stupid gift,” I said. “I don’t know why anyone would bring it.”
          My grandpa considered this.
          “Looks like a pretty nice scarf, though,” he said. “Silk, probably. Maybe European.”
          “It’s polyester,” I said, and started to cry.
          My grandpa shrugged, and we both sat there looking at the scarf.
          “Listen,” said my grandpa, lowering his voice. “I know the white elephant thing is finished, and this is technically against the rules, but I still have one trade left and I’d like to use it.”
          He reached into his pocket and pulled out the chess set; he must have snatched it from Colin in the final seconds of the exchange.
          “How about you give me that scarf,” he said.
          I couldn’t believe it, and the astonishment must have showed on my face because my grandpa nodded encouragingly and held the chess set out to me.
          “Are you sure?” I said, sniffling.
          “If you’re sure you can part with that scarf,” he said.
          My grandpa laid the chess set down next to me on the couch and gingerly removed the scarf from my hands. He folded it carefully and tucked it into his pocket. I stared in wonder at the wooden chess set as my grandpa got up to rejoin the party.
          It wasn’t until a few years later that I realized that the scarf must have been the gift that my grandpa had brought to the party, that it must have belonged to my grandma, that he must have hoped it would mean something to whoever ended up keeping it.
          It’s a bittersweet, touching story in its way, and it’s the version of events I always recount at family functions when we’re waxing nostalgic about my grandpa, the version I told as an aspiring anecdotist at the dinner after my grandpa’s funeral, and, in fact, it’s pretty much the version I told my mom on the car ride home from the Christmas party that year, aware even at that age that I couldn’t convey the experience as it had actually happened.
          Here's the real story:
          First off, even before my grandpa joined me on the loveseat, I knew full well who had brought the scarf to the party. Since Grandma’s stroke, my grandpa consistently brought the most undesirable gifts to the annual white elephant exchanges—a chipped mug, an old pair of slippers, an empty picture frame. My cousins and I had learned to keep an eye on whatever present my grandpa brought, and then stay as far away as possible from whoever got it.
          “It’s a stupid gift,” I said to my grandpa after he’d sat down next to me, my small body overcome with fury at his elderly incompetence, at his pathetic attempts to talk up the scarf. “I don’t know why anyone would bring it.”
          We both sat there on the loveseat, looking at the scarf. I’m fairly certain my grandpa knew that I knew exactly where the scarf had come from.
          “Let me tell you something,” he said after a minute, his voice shaking with emotion—anger, by the sound of it. “That scarf used to belong to a lady by the name of Greta Barnes, and Greta Barnes is the only person I’ve ever loved.”
          This woman was not my grandma. I had no idea what to say to that, and so—my grandpa staring daggers at me—I sat still and listened.
          “We saw each other, off and on, for about fifty years,” my grandpa said. “I should have married her instead of your grandmother, but it was complicated. I won’t get into the details because you probably wouldn’t care or understand. Suffice it to say, I married your grandmother, Irene, and she’s an admirable woman, but I’ve never loved her.”
          He paused for a moment. I was well and truly terrified now, completely out of my depth, bowels rumbling, lip trembling.
          “Right after Irene’s stroke, when it looked like she wasn’t going to make it, I told Greta we should get married—I’d be single man soon. But Greta said she could never marry me, that she’d been meaning to break things off with me for years, that she’d been planning to tell Irene everything in some cockeyed attempt to make things right, but now she’d missed her chance because she was stupid and weak and greedy, and Irene was going to die, which meant it was too late to fix anything.”
          My grandpa wiped his nose with the back of his hand and gave me a hard, appraising look.
          “Do you understand anything I’m saying to you?” he said.
          I couldn’t manage more than a frightened squeak, so Grandpa grunted with disgust and kept talking.
          “I told her she was being ridiculous,” he said, “but she wouldn’t listen. I said, what’s the harm in the two of us finding a little happiness together, and she just kind of fell apart then and told me I wouldn’t understand happiness if it bit me in the ass. And that was the last thing she ever said to me.
          “Irene recovered, or at least she didn’t die, which you already know, and I reached out to Greta to try and pick things up again, go back to the way they were before, but she wouldn’t answer her phone, wouldn’t answer her door when I drove over there to try and talk some sense into her.
          “And then one Saturday afternoon, I found a stack of boxes on the back porch and do you know what was inside?”
          He waited for an answer. I shook my head.
          “Everything I’d ever given that woman,” he said. “Fifty years’ worth of jewelry, souvenirs, letters—you name it. I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t…”
          He snatched the scarf from my hands and shook it violently in my face.
          “I burned everything in those boxes except this scarf because it reminds me of the one perfect day, the one and only happy day I ever had.”
          He made a sound somewhere between a bark and a sob.
          “I have no idea why I brought it to this disgusting party,” he said, looking down at the scarf in his hands, “no idea why I’m even telling you any of this.”
          And then he stopped himself.
          “No,” he said. “I know exactly why I’m telling you this. Look at me—there’s something you need to know. Hey, look at me.”
          I turned in the loveseat so I was looking right at him. I had never been more frightened in my life.
          “The reason I’m telling you this,” he continued, “is that when your mom and all your aunts and uncles were conceived, my heart was someplace else. That’s why they’re all so rotten inside—they only have half a heart. It’s genetics. It’s science. And that’s why all you kids are a little bit rotten inside, too.”
          He wadded up the hideous pheasant scarf and threw it in my lap. He nodded at the gaudy fabric.
          “If you don’t want the scarf,” he said, “then throw it away.”
          He stood up from the loveseat and shambled off to rejoin the party. After he had gone, I saw it, wedged into the crack between the arm of the loveseat and the other cushion—the chess set. It must have fallen from my grandpa’s pocket.
          I looked around the room at my aunts and uncles, my siblings, my cousins, their faces shining with edgy glee, their bodies moving in unconscious time to the tinny Christmas music pouring out of my Uncle Ken’s shoddy boom box. I took a series of deep breaths, the air thick with evergreen and sweat, my fear gradually trickling away.
          And then, smiling, I picked up the chess set and put it in my pocket.