It was Christmastime. I must have been 10 or 11. We were at my dad’s parents’ house in rural Nebraska. My grandparents lived in a little red ranch house with a one-car attached garage, right on the corner of a quiet street and a major highway. It had just snowed.

My aunt and uncle, my dad’s younger brother, and their two girls were there too, cozied into that house – my grandpa in his blue chair, with the television set blaring, my grandma puttering around her little kitchen, enticing scents wafting from her well-loved oven. My little brothers were down in the unfinished basement, bouncing rubber balls around, their shouts echoing from the depths, up to the rest of us. My little sister, only a toddler then, sat cuddled on my mom’s lap. My dad and his brother, sprawled out on the blue-and-gold-flowered couch, talked politics, my aunt politely asked grandma how she could help in the preparation of the feast to come. My cousins, about my age, and I were sitting quietly there in the crowded living room, too old to take part in games and toy-playing, but too little to be much interested in grown-up conversation.

The meal was exquisite, all the usual for holidays in our family – ham, duck, mashed potatoes, gravy, broccoli and rice casserole, homemade rolls with real butter, red Jell-O with banana slices, home-canned pickles, both sweet and dill, cherry pie with vanilla ice cream for dessert. We feasted and then the agonizing wait while the table was cleared and the dishes were hand-washed (no dishwasher there at grandpa and grandma’s) and hand-dried and put back into the cupboards, squeaky clean, then the leftovers into various sizes and colors of Tupperware and into the fridge.

And finally, the moment we’d all been waiting for, or at least all the kids – time to gather around the Christmas tree and open gifts. Opening, opening, opening…and the cousin who is my exact same age, exact same grade in school, opens the best present from my grandparents (or at least the best present a pre-adolescent girl, like me, in 1990 could possibly receive) – a black and pink, sparkly, leopard-print sweat suit, matching shirt and pants. Wow. After witnessing that wonder, it was my turn to open my gift from grandpa and grandma. And…my gift. A plain, light blue sweat suit. No black and pink, no leopard-print, no sparkles. Nothing. And blue, a boy color.

I tried to be thankful, I really did. Think I even managed to choke out a thank you at the appropriate time. But inside, ouch. That was a hard one to swallow. And made all the harder by a conversation, overheard later that day. It was my grandma, my dad’s mom, hunched over my mom at the kitchen table, talking in a whispered tone: “How much does Julie weigh now? Does the doctor think that’s healthy? She’s gained some weight since the last time you were here, hasn’t she? You really need to watch that”…and my mom, always my best friend and most loyal defender: “I don’t know and I don’t think it matters and, yes, she’s healthy, and it’s none of your concern.”

Those few sentences, maybe 20 seconds in length, changed me. And even now, more than 25 years later, those words ring loud in my ears, in my heart. That day was the first time in my life I remember really pondering: Is there something wrong with me? Am I fat? Am I not good enough? Am I not pretty enough? Does everyone think these things about me? Is that why I got the light blue sweat suit and not the sparkly, black and pink, leopard print one?

And looking back now, in a certain way – that time, that place – was really the very beginning of my quest to know Beauty – Beauty in me, Beauty in the world, and, as I would find later, Beauty Himself.  And so, it was all a gift.

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