One summer's day back in 1959, a small cube shaped package arrived in the mail, wrapped up in brown paper.  I was seven years old at the time, and the package was addressed to me.  My mother, no doubt, thought this was very odd as she shifted the package all around in her hands looking for a return address.  There wasn't one.  I could sense that she was concerned about someone sending me something in the mail without her knowing about it first, and this made the little package seem even more mysterious.  I was dying to take it from her and tear open the wrapping to see what was inside.  She, however, did the honours.  Back in the fifties, kids knew better than to just grab things out of their parents hands even if it was addressed to them.  Nevertheless, it did bother me that she should be the one to open my package.

    When the box was finally opened, my mother pulled out the most beautiful object that I, at my young age, had ever seen.  It was a very expensive looking snowglobe...the kind you shake to make little flakes of snow fall on whatever miniature landscape is inside the glass ball.  Mine was a nativity scene.

     While my mother was busy talking to her friend next door, who had been standing beside us watching the opening of the mysterious gift, I held the snow globe in my hand and shook it gently so that a little snowstorm swept over the nativity.  I'd never seen anything like this!  What a fantastic present for someone to send me.  My mother, though, seemed quite upset.  She couldn't imagine who would be sending me this unusual gift...a nativity scent in the summer?  And who, she wondered, would be sending Linda a "religious" object...what was the meaning of this?  After all, we were Protestant and didn't have any religious objects in our house.  She phoned all her friends and relatives to find out if any of them had sent it.  No one had.

     Somewhere amidst the conversations following the arrival of my beautiful glass snow globe the notion that perhaps it could have been sent by my birth mother occurred to someone within my family.  Because of our understanding of sealed records and total and absolute secrecy involving adoption, this idea was soon dismissed by the adults.  But I picked up on this theory immediately.  Yes, I believed, it had to have been from my mother.  I kept the snow globe on my dresser and stared into it constantly.  Deep inside myself I felt a calm and peacefulness watching the baby Jesus in his little bed of straw surrounded by his Mother Mary and Father Joseph and the sheep, cow and donkey and, of course, the three wise men.  I was completely mesmerized by the little scene within the glass globe.

     I can't recall exactly how long I had my present from the unknown sender.  It wasn't very long though.  I do, however, remember very clearly the day my mother was in my room sweeping the floor and the precise moment that the handle of her broom connected with my precious gift, knocking it off the top of my dresser and sending it smashing to the floor in a thousand little slivers of glass.  I felt as though my heart had been smashed along with it, but as much as I wanted to yell at my mother for breaking my treasure I feared that if I did she would somehow suspect what we both felt to be true yet had never dared mention out loud to each other.  I did not want her to think that I loved this little snow globe because it had come from my "real" mother (as she used to refer to my birth mother).  When she started to apologize to me for breaking it, I assured her that it didn't matter but I did add that I would like to keep the base and the nativity scene which had miraculously survived the fall.  I had to glue the nativity back onto the base...I wasn't about to give up my gift that easily.

     I don't know what became of the remains of my snow globe over the years.  My mother most likely tossed it out with all my dolls and teddies and other toys during one of her cleaning sprees of my room.  I never really forgot about it, though.  It remained embedded in my mind forever...enough so that I guess I didn't need to have it sitting in front of me in order to find that calm and peacefulness it used to give me.  I could just think about it and feel my birth mother's presence around me.

     One thing that I always wondered about, though, was the significance of the nativity scene.  What was it symbolic of exactly?  This question has haunted me for thirty-eight years.  I recently succeeded in locating my birth mother's family, and last night, at a "real" family reunion at my cousin's house in Richmond Hill, Ontario, I discovered its' true meaning.  As we were hugging good-bye after a wonderful evening together, I told my cousin, Nancy, that this was going to be the best Christmas I could ever hope for.  She whispered into my ear "Remember the snow globe story, Linda?"...I had told her about it during the first phone call I'd made to her.  "Well, she continued "it was a nativity scene, right?  This is Christmas.  Your mother was telling you that you would be back with your family at Christmas."  We both had a tear in our eye and held eac other tight...this time the ties would never be broken again.  I am back home with my family for Christmas.

(I will really never know exactly who sent me that little snowglobe back in the late 50's.  I'd like to believe it was from my birth mother.  Maybe it was from my foster parents or perhaps even my birth father, which seems highly unlikely since I'm pretty sure he never even knew I existed. Whoever sent it to me will never know the impact that little snowglobe had on me...it's a memory I'll take to my grave.)