Knowing How to Keep Marriage Intact Is a Gift

I think I can pre-announce confidently that our marriage has survived my wife’s and my exchange of Christmas gifts. If that sentence is confusing, you must understand that this is being written before Christmas Day, owing to the fact that my deadline for a Sunday column falls on Thursdays, and everybody knows what day last Thursday was.

The only way my family could have a Christmas turkey roasted by me was, naturally, for me to stay home last Thursday and cook it. Therefore this column was written several days before Christmas.

Even so, I know my wife and I are pleased with our exchange of gifts. Also, our marriage is not in jeopardy, like some I read about recently in The Times. I was especially impressed by reporter Lynn Smith’s story about the wife who received a high-domed covered electric skillet from her husband for Christmas, and she knew then that their marriage was doomed. Shortly after that they were divorced.

Until I read about that, I never realized the potential matrimonial danger inherent in an unappreciated gift. I am chilled by the memory of what I gave my wife for her birthday this year.

I presented her with a red wheelbarrow. I could tell she wasn’t overly excited about something to wheel fertilizer around in to her container garden in the front yard. But I never dreamed I might be tampering perilously with our marriage.

Before I read Smith’s article, some instinctual forewarning prompted me not to give my wife, as a Christmas present, a sack of fertilizer for her wheelbarrow. That might have ended it.

Instead, I bought her things I was certain she would like, because she told me she would like them long before Christmas. One of them is a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Silverado Squatters,” his recollections of California and particularly of the Napa Valley, where he spent his honeymoon encamped in the hills near the old Silverado trail.

What is memorable about this edition is that it was printed letterpress by the famous Grabhorn Press of San Francisco, now defunct. A book as interesting as this one and as finely designed and printed is guaranteed to keep our marriage intact for at least another year--that is, so long as she doesn’t keep the bedside light on too long while reading it and disturb my slumber.

She also got from me a large, cozy, hooded sweat shirt with “National Fisherman” emblazoned across the front. My wife happens to be a sweat shirt aficionado, wearing them not only on our boat but at home. She had indicated she was growing a little weary of her favorite sweat shirt advertising the bathhouse at Avalon, Catalina Island. It was losing its fuzz. A sweat shirt without comfortable fuzz inside has outlived its usefulness.

As for myself, I was pleased with my Topsider deck shoes, a brown leather pair and a red canvas pair. My wife made sure I’d like them, as well as making sure they fit correctly, by my going to the store with her so I could try them on. She wrapped them up prettily and put them beneath the Christmas tree. I especially like the red canvas ones. They were on sale for 80% off. The reason was that the right shoe had been a display model, and it had faded to a lighter red than the left one.

With my two-tone red shoes and my bah-humbug tie, worn, but only once a year, I was the fashion hit of the neighborhood on Christmas Day, not to mention Jim White’s envy when he heard about the money we saved on the shoes. Jim is always showing me his garage sale bargains, but he never got a pair of Topsiders that cheap for Christmas.

Well, that was our Christmas, as accurately as I could predict it. I’m sure it will be a happy one, and hope all of you have fared as well as I think we did, especially in the matrimonial department. I suggest that the moral of this is that a marriage without unwanted surprises at Christmas is a stable marriage--a union of dullness, perhaps, but safe, mind you.

I wouldn’t want it any other way. There are enough unwanted surprises awaiting us, all of us, in the new year in the outside world. So my New Year’s wish for one and all is a buffered haven away from unwanted outside surprises--a safe and stable home life.