Pretty Packages

“Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present”.

Anonymous

There was nothing special about that room. Nothing chic, nothing elegant, nothing that would fill a neighbor’s eyes with green fire, or adorn the pages of some slick, “modern living’ magazine.

It was just a room. A living room. An ordinary, run-of-the-mill, 1950’s tract house living room, with picture windows, pink venetian blinds, plastic, floral-print curtains, a frowsy couch and a frumpy chair, a few cherished knickknacks, an old wooden magic box that carried the antics of Abbott and Costello right into your home, and a brick fireplace that was seldom used in the balmy clime of Garden Grove, California.

It was just a room. But once a year, when my mother would decorate the walls with garlands and stars, and the tree with tinsel and lights and gay, resplendent orbs, that room became the loveliest place on earth. And like a flower unfurling, it grew lovelier with each passing day as more and more presents were placed beneath the tree.

I loved it all, but I especially loved watching that circle of gifts grow. And not simply because I knew some of them were for me. Wrapped in rainbows, inhabited by secrets and tender thoughts, that pile of pretty packages seemed insufferably fine, a bounty of shapes and colors and dreams almost too beautiful to disassemble. But disassemble it we did, invariably on Christmas Eve and invariably with keen deliberation, savoring each gift that came our way.

Because the best things really did seem to come in the biggest packages, my brother Denny and I would begin with the smallest presents and work upwards, slowly, deliberately, rapturously disassembling our way through the glorious bouquet of gifts until we finally came to the Big One, the Penultimate One, the one we had dreamed about and schemed about and never truly believed we’d receive.

The very best gift of all.

I am an adult now, a veteran of many Christmas Eves and Christmas Days, but the tumbling years have not purloined the joy I feel every time I gaze upon a pile of pretty packages. But some things do change, and those years have shown me that pretty packages are not just found beneath the Christmas tree; that, in fact, ours is a world inundated with pretty packages, packages both large and small, and that if we but take the time to look for them, the gifts secreted within can make a bicycle, or a dollhouse, or even a Genuine Red Ryder Carbine Action Two Hundred Shot Lightning Loader Model Air Rifle seem downright paltry by comparison.

Let’s begin small, the way Denny and I always would. And I mean small, really and resolutely small; say, about one-hundred millionth of an inch. Everything you see around us – every rock, every tree, every you, every me – are a consortium of molecules, the tiny raw material from which reality was hewn.

Drink a cup of hot tea and that tea is hot because its molecules are engaged in a frantic dance, whirling and wobbling like a roomful of rockers. Put that tea in the refrigerator, though, and those rockers lose their energy in a hurry, ultimately moving with all the vim and vivacity of the surviving contestants in the last reel of “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” And because they are specific – and symmetrically lovely – combinations of atoms, molecules are packages, too, whose gift within is the mortar and brick of the physical world without.

A good beginning. Now let’s open another package, considerably larger than than a molecule and – if you happen to be alive – nearly as fundamental. We won’t have any difficulty finding this package, because it’s most everywhere.

It’s the cell.

Often exquisitely fetching, the cell is the basic unit of life, so fundamentally sublime that it can build everything from a bacterium to a ballerina. A package that includes the plasma membrane, the cytoplasm, and – in plant and animal cells – a nucleus and tiny energy factories called mitochondria. The cell can carry out thousands of biochemical reactions every minute, and even reproduce itself. It can do these spectacular things because in the nucleus (and, to a lesser extent, the mitochondria) are the coiled strands of DNA, your own personal blueprint for the making of you.

The body you call home is home to 20 to 30 trillion cells, and though vastly larger than a molecule, it is estimated that roughly 10,000 human cells could fit on the head of a pin. And the gift secreted within these pretty packages is easy to guess; it is nothing less than the gift of life.

Molecules and cells are both terrifically wee, as wee as they are widespread, and as we chart our passage through the day, we only see them with imagination’s eye. But we don’t need imagination to spot the vast majority of the gifts beneath our planetary “tree”; most are lying about in plain sight, just waiting to be unwrapped.

Consider, for instance, the flower.

It’s awfully hard to picture a world without flowers, but it happened. It happened for approximately 4.5 billion years of our fair orb’s existence, for it was only during the last 100 million years or so that flowers have blossomed at all. A world without flowers is not a pretty thought, but that only illustrates how very much these pretty packages of color and form and function, these omnipresent living rainbows, contribute to the fathomless beauty of our world. There are about 220,000 known species of flowering plants on this planet, and each one, each rose or daisy, each poppy or dandelion, is a gift.

A gift of beauty, and a gift of butterflies.

Our global Christmas tree is immense, and so is the bounty of wondrous presents spread beneath it. And you needn’t journey far to find them.

Step outside your door and look at that tree in your yard. It has a long lineage. Trees have graced this earth for some 370 million years, beginning with the Wattieza, a relative of the tree ferns, and “branching” out into more and more of these green and lofty lives, until today our planet is adorned with roughly three trillion trees, comprising over 60,000 distinct species. And every one of those trees – be they oak, or pine or eucalyptus – is a gift of life to the tiny lives that live within it, or those that nest upon it, or find cover beneath it. For us they are gifts of wood and wonder and the oxygen we breathe.

The celebration continues, and not just for one day, but for every day of every year. Take a walk, and your path is adorned with packages to open. Look closely at a rock and you are likely looking at a postcard from the past, a remnant from an ancient and vanished landscape. Now turn that rock over and unveil a dark chamber of secret lives.

You pass a library, and if you walk inside, you are unwrapping a gift of truly mind-blowing majesty, a portal into the greatest thoughts and dreams and achievements of the human race.

You pass a person on the street, and you are passing a package of untold mystery and splendor, a miracle four billion years in the making and with a head full of experiences you will never know.

Finally, wherever you are, whoever you are, take a moment to plant your feet on the ground, and consider exactly what you standing upon. Because there is still one more gift to open, and it’s the Big One. The Penultimate One. The Earth. Our Earth. Our amazing little home in the heavens, whirling at 1,000 miles per hour and whizzing around the sun at a steady clip of 66,000 miles per hour. For our Earth is indeed our greatest gift, a marvelous planet with enough marvels to fill a thousand lifetimes.

Those wondrous moments Denny and I passed beneath our Christmas trees are long-gone now, as are our pink venetian blinds, our old, wooden magic box, and nearly every one of those gaily-wrapped gifts we so excitedly opened. Yes, it is a little sad. But there is more than a little consolation in knowing that, just beyond our door, there is a world full of pretty packages, just waiting to be opened.

And when you call this Earth home, every day is Christmas Day.

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