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cardboard bin stored in the living-room closet behind the winter coats and umbrellas. If a birthday came around without warning, if there was an unexpected wedding or a forgotten anniversary, she would send us to the box to find an appropriate last-minute gift. The box held the leftovers given to my mother by her third-grade students, expendable gifts like cheap leather wallets, lifesaver books, inexpensive vases, an assortment of gloves, scarves—and one special item, a red plastic wallet with a window on the front displaying a postcard-size portrait of a handsome and lean Jesus Christ.
    We called it the “Jesus wallet,” and like the big
calzones,
it was given to one or another family member every Christmas. But unlike the giant panties, the Jesus wallet was a serious gift—too serious for teenage girls. We never used the wallet, but each year, secretly, put it back in the gift box for someone else. By the time another Christmas came around, Mother often forgot which of us had been given the Jesus wallet the year before.
    These perennial Christmas gifts were but two of the many presents we received each year from our mother. She never gave us each one or two, or even six or eight gifts. The numbers ranged into the twenties and sometimes thirties. Christmas with my mother never meant lack but overabundance. She gave and gave and then gave more. She was the most generous person I have ever known. If she gave you two or three pairs of socks, they were never wrapped together. Each pair had its own distinctive paper, bow, and gift tag. If she gave you a pair of shoes, each one was wrapped separately.
    You could count on a huge individual pile of gifts. One by one, each daughter opened her gifts, and then ceremoniously tried on her clothing, hats and shoes, displayed and commented on any number of offbeat and original items. The process took a long time, but time was all we had then. To our mother’s delight, after we’d tried on every single outfit, we’d leave them on display in the living room for several days, draped over the couch. Later, when I became the caretaker of my elderly father, I found myself doing the same thing. I laid out all his gifts on the couch for him to see, his new outfits, his new towels and blankets, his flannel pajamas, his Velcro tennis shoes.
    Mother was so proud to see us wearing the things she’d given us. She was an impeccable seamstress and made many of our dresses and suits, purses, pillows, blankets and quilts. Anything you wanted or needed, she could copy. We complained as we stood on wooden chairs in the TV room while she pinned up our skirts or marked a chalk line on the spot where a hem should go. I often whined while she ordered me to “Turn, turn, no, too far, go back.” But I loved the clothes she made us. And we loved her, although she sometimes scared us.
    Mother could be more imposing than Sister Alma Sophie, the principal at Holy Cross Elementary School, known for her strictness and the lingering smell of her false teeth. Mother could be tougher than Father Ryan, known for his intractable one-sided stance, his Hollywood good looks, wasted on a priest. My mother was the original bogeywoman, a disciplinarian who stopped us with her upraised hand and a razor sharp “
Ya,
that’s enough.” A “
Ya
” from her could stop a speeding train.
    My parents split up when I was ten. The divorce dealt a great blow to my mother’s spirit, but it didn’t prevent her from inviting my father to spend Christmas and many other holidays with us, nor did it prevent him from accepting her many invitations. Whenever he drove down to Las Cruces from his home in Santa Fe, he always remembered to bring along his dirty laundry, thrown carelessly into the trunk and onto the back seat of his old pea-green Pontiac. A banged-up mess of a car, Mother nicknamed it “Jaws” for its gaping trunk held down by several twisted coat hangers. Daddy