No Quiero Nada

As part of our Advent tradition every year at St. Stephen’s, we erect a Giving Tree in the parish hall. There are different paper cutout ornaments for different age groups at the Canal Street Mission; on the front is a child’s name, and on the back they write something they would like for Christmas. I always try to pick cards for kids that parallel the ages of my own children, the better to imagine the child we’re buying a gift for.

But it’s hard to imagine the five-year-old little girl who wrote on the back of her card, “No quiero nada” – I don’t want anything. I wonder what her life must be like, to make her want to give up on the joy that is Christmas, and it makes me feel so sad. I anguish over what to get her, and then decide that every child needs magic, so I choose some fairy wings and a sparkling musical wand. I wonder if they’ll do the trick.

Maybe, though, just maybe, young Noemi is wise beyond her five years. Perhaps when she wrote “I don’t want anything,” she was really saying “I want for nothing.” It’s possible, that in a life with so little wealth, she’s already discovered that the greatest gifts of all don’t come wrapped in tissue paper. And that idea, that hope, is a gift I’ll carry in my own heart all season long.