I was in the sixth grade when Christmas Day rolled around in 1988. It had been years since I stopped believing in Santa Claus, and it was a strain just to maintain the pretense of Santa. It had been years since I’d woken up early on Christmas morning, pumping with adrenaline, and dashing to the Christmas tree to see what surprises had been left underneath overnight. In 1988, I slept until a reasonable hour in my bed (a twin mattress on top of a conference table that couldn’t be stored anywhere else) in the bedroom I shared with my sister. Her bed was already empty.

I got up and went to the bathroom. I spent a few minutes in the kitchen making myself some instant hot chocolate before finally stepping foot in the living room. There, the tree was lit, and beneath it was an assortment of gifts we’d opened the night before and some new ones (from Santa), still wrapped. The stockings, hanging from the mantle above the inoperable fireplace (now mostly hidden by the eight-year-old freestanding Sony television), were full. My family was assembling for the Christmas morning tradition, and I took a seat in a blue velour swivel chair, sipping cocoa in my cotton pajamas.

“Looks like Santa came!” my father’s chirped, all smiles, “Are you kids ready to open your stockings?”

“Give me a minute to wake up,” I replied quietly, taking another sip of hot chocolate. I needed a little time to get into character, to match my father’s enthusiasm.

My father really dialed it up to eleven at this time of year. I can still hear him singing “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…” every half hour. I doubt that he knew the whole song because he would only sing that one line, sometimes freestyled into “It’s beginning to smell a lot like Christmas” while my mom was cooking or baking, or some other variation using one of the senses to fit any number of insignificant scenarios.

Every Christmas Eve, we would take a drive, looking at Christmas lights in wealthy neighborhoods. Large multi-story houses with stone-arch entrances and three-car garages would blink and twinkle in the night. Electric lawn ornaments—Santa and his reindeer-drawn sleigh, nativity scenes, snowmen—would turn manicured front lawns into worlds as magical as Narnia in the imaginations of children. Some would play music that could be heard from the street, and we would press up against the cold windows of the car in wonder while choosing which house we would live in when we got rich.

We would come home and read the stories of Jesus’s birth from the gospels aloud, and my dad would give commentary about how the Savior was born in a barn and laid in a manger, making our own poverty seem holy, as if my father’s inability to make money in his many get-rich-quick schemes was actually a sign of God’s favor. Knowing that we were called by the Lord to do great things, and be rewarded handsomely for it according to the “prosperity gospel” televangelists we watched on TV, the devil was just trying to hold us down. Our poverty now just reinforced the inevitability of future wealth. (For the record, the Bible never said Mary and Joseph couldn’t afford a hotel room. The inn was simply booked at capacity by the time they arrived.)

Finally, after the best parts of the nativity story in each gospel were read, we would exchange gifts. Gift-giving was a theater exercise, playacting at its most exhausting level. There was enormous pressure on the gift-givers to offer presents that would be loved by the gift-receivers, but without money to buy the things they might really want. There was an equal pressure on the gift-receivers to show hyperbolic gratitude for the gesture, even if the gift was undesirable, unusable, or senseless. Everyone would put on their best faces for each other, swallowing the stress and hoping for the best.

Just the night before, during the gift exchange, my mother was ecstatic about the rubber spatula I’d given her. “I needed a new spatula! Thank you so much!”

One of the gifts I had opened was a teal-colored teeshirt, on the front of which was written in white letters, “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.”

“Thank you so much, it’s my favorite color!” I said in my most enthusiastic voice.

“Let everyone see it!” my father instructed. I held it up for everyone to see. My mother’s face sank and her eyes got long.

“When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping,” she read aloud. “Oh, I’m so sorry! When I bought it, I guess I didn’t read it very well. I thought it said, ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going.’ I’m so sorry!”

“No, I love it,” I assured her. “I’ll just wear it under an over-shirt. It’s perfect!”

“You don’t have to wear it, buddy.” She’d gotten it at Value Village, a thrift shop chain, and she wouldn’t be able to return it. “Maybe we can find someone who could use it.” Her sadness and embarrassment could be read all over her face.

“No, it’s fine, mom! Thank you so much, I love it!” I knew I would never wear the teeshirt, but it was important to be grateful, and to make my mother feel better. That was my responsibility, no matter how exhausting.

So, on Christmas morning, I couldn’t drink my cocoa slow enough. I eyed the stockings on the mantle and the gifts under the tree—the tree we’d cut down ourselves on the property behind someone’s house. My father had said he’d gotten permission but kept looking over his shoulder while we hiked in from the road behind the property, hurried while he sawed at the trunk, and rushed us out of there with the tree as quickly as he could. While I surveyed the room, I readied myself for the next round of Christmas cheer. I took a deep breath.

“OK, I’m ready.”

My father got the stockings down from the mantle and gave them to my sister and me. “Let’s see what Santa left for you!”

I worked my way through the stocking from top to bottom, taking one item out at a time, pausing to show the appropriate excitement for each little gift. There was an orange and a couple of tangerines. (“Ooh, an orange!”) There was a small tube of Looney Tunes toothpaste. (“Wow, I can’t wait to brush my teeth!”) There was a dimestore digital watch. (“Now I’ll always know what time it is!”) There were a few loose Energizer batteries. (“I can really use these!”) There was a rubber Energizer Bunny that doubled as a tiny flashlight if you squeezed his bass drum—no doubt having been separated from the missing package for the batteries. (“I needed a flashlight!”) There were two pairs of white athletic socks. (“Awesome! I needed more socks!”) There were peanuts in the shell filling all the empty spaces in the stocking. (“Yum!”)

My father had a philosophy that more was better, that quantity was better than quality. He and my mother would argue about this over the years. She would suggest that if they only had a set number of dollars to spend on a person, they should try to spend it on fewer but better things that would really be appreciated. My father thought that Christmas was more successful if there were a greater number of gifts to open, even if that meant cheaper, less useful gifts. The spatula I’d given my mother the night before was actually purchased as a set of three, but on my father’s instructions, I’d separated them and wrapped them individually (“Oh! Another spatula! Now I have three new spatulas! Thank you!”). To my father, the joy of Christmas was in the act of opening gifts, not the gifts themselves. He would’ve wrapped the two pairs of socks in my stocking as four gifts if my mother would have let him. On this Christmas, as on others, my parents had gone to the drugstore for stocking stuffers and bought anything they could find under five dollars until their budget was maxed.

I reached into the bottom of the stocking, and my fingers settled on something metal. I pulled out a tiny brass whistle, an inch long and perhaps an eighth of an inch wide. It was tarnished and scuffed. There was a misshapen ring at the top that must have once connected it to a chain that would have attached to a key ring. For reasons I can’t even ascertain, this tiny used whistle confused me more than even the Energizer Bunny.

“A dog whistle?” I asked, nonplussed.

It clearly wasn’t a dog whistle, even I knew that. I just didn’t know what it was for. I struggled to think of some use for it for which I could show gratitude, and as I scrambled to contextualize this little whistle, the wrong words came out. A dog whistle?

“Let me tell you a story,” my father said sternly. The story went something like this:

There once was a family who lived on a farm out on the prairie. They were poor and barely had any food to eat. On Christmas morning, there was a new blanket of snow that blocked the doors and windows, but the hearth was going and kept the house warm. When the son woke up, he saw that there were no gifts under the tree for him. Santa hadn’t come that night. To ease his disappointment, his parents suggested that maybe Santa just couldn’t get there through the snowstorm. But, the kid had faith that Santa would never let him down. If he couldn’t get to the house in the storm, he must have left the presents in the barn. So, the kid threw open the door and started tunneling his way through the snow. His parents tried to dissuade him, but there was no stopping him now. He tunneled all the way to the barn and managed to get the barn door open enough to get in. Inside, however, there was nothing but a big pile of horse shit. The kid got even more excited. By the time his parents reached the barn, he was knee-deep in manure with his shovel, hucking shit in every direction.

“What are you doing?!” his parents asked him. “There’s nothing here but horse shit.”

Undeterred, the boy exclaimed, “Where there’s horse shit, there’s gotta be a horse!

I thought about his story for a second. Then, my eyes lit up and my heart started pounding as I made parallels between the story and the “dog whistle” in my stocking.

“I got a dog?!

I jumped out of my chair and started racing around the house. I’d always wanted a dog! I wanted to play with a dog, wrestle with a dog, train a dog, feed a dog, sleep in my bed with a dog. And now there must be a dog, maybe a puppy, hiding somewhere in the house!

“Come back in here!” my father shouted.

But, like that kid in the story, there was no stopping me now. I raced from room to room, looking under beds, peering into closets, ducking under tables. That puppy had to be here somewhere! He was just waiting for me to find him! Any second now, I’d be squeezing my very own puppy who would lick my face and love me more than anyone else! We’d have so many adventures together!

“Stop! Come here! There is no dog!”  my father yelled from the living room.

I let that sink in for a minute. Of course, there was no dog. I should’ve known that I couldn’t have been that fortunate. I’d let myself get excited for a moment, to have an expectation, and now I felt stupid and embarrassed when that expectation was dashed. I walked slowly back into the living room, staring at my feet.

“There’s no dog,” my father repeated in almost an accusatory tone. “The point of the story is that you should be an optimist, look for the best in a situation, and be grateful, even if it’s horse shit. That kid was thankful for horse shit, unlike you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

I felt like a horrible kid. My family couldn’t have afforded a dog, much less feed one. And as careful as I’d been to express gratitude for each gift, I’d lost my focus for a moment, allowed myself to desire, and made myself and everyone around me feel terrible in my greed.

I didn’t know it then, but the real lesson I was learning was the first three of the Buddha’s “Four Noble Truths.” Life is suffering, suffering comes from desire, and to rid yourself of suffering, you must rid yourself of desire. The real takeaway wasn’t a lesson in optimism and gratitude, it was a lesson in dissociation. If you want nothing, you will never be disappointed. It was a lesson that extended beyond the confines of a single holiday and seeped into the rest of my life.

Last year, however, during the holidays, the woman I love began to help me unlearn that lesson. But that’s a story for another day.