he battle between my parents and American consumer culture reached its height during Christmas. Why couldn’t my sister and I be the proud owners of a dancing, prancing, battery-operated Rudolph? Why couldn’t a life-sized plastic Santa grace our lawn? And why did we always have to get a real tree? Why not one of those pink fakes topped with white acrylic frost? Or a shiny gold tree with branches stiff as broom bristles? Some of the phonies even rotated on their stands, a sight to see, miraculously changing colors every thirty seconds.

Why couldn’t we? Why not? The answer was simple. The traditions associated with Christmas in Lithuania were so deeply ingrained that adding to or subtracting from them would have been like fiddling around with the First Amendment. One big difference between us and the amerikonai was that our big celebration occurred on Christmas Eve. It commenced with Kucios, the meal that in Lithuania had always begun with the sighting of the first star. No meat was allowed, and, a much more difficult restriction for the fathers--no alcohol. The table had to be covered with a white linen tablecloth. There had to be twelve dishes. For the twelve apostles, the nuns told us. My sister and I—little accountants—would monitor the evening’s procession of dishes. We knew that rye bread counted as a dish, but butter did not. I was not terribly fond of most of the food—pickled herring, pickled whitefish, pickled mushrooms—though a few of the dishes I’ve grown so accustomed to that Kucios isn’t the same without them: a vinaigrette made of chopped beets, peas, navy beans and celery, smothered in mayonnaise; borscht with mushrooms and potatoes. The meal always ended with kisielius, a thick gelatinous cranberry pudding more sour than sweet, followed by slizikai, hard little cubes of bread, soaked in poppy-seed milk.

After the Kucios meal, the opening of presents, or, rather, present, for most parents in our neighborhood couldn’t afford more than one gift per child (and would have limited the number even if they’d had the money.) The gift was usually a fairly substantial one—a doll, an appropriate educational game, a chemistry set, a microscope. A sweater or a pair of pajamas might be under the tree as well, though my sister and I  didn’t count these as actual presents. And one might expect a book or two from grandparents. Once in awhile, however, extremely intelligent friends of our parents brought “a little something” that excited us beyond all measure: a Slinky, some Silly Putty, an Etch-a-Sketch.

For the most part, we were satisfied with our new possessions. Occasionally, though, grave errors in judgment were committed by the elders. When I was in fourth grade, I asked for a game called Operation. The object of the game was to remove various organs with a pair of tweezers from a rotund, pasty-looking cardboard “patient” whose bulbous red nose lit up if the “doctor” accidentally touched a surrounding body part. My mother objected strenuously to Operation, which she had seen advertised on television. She hated the very sight of the cardboard man, his pale skin, his bulging, sickly eyes, his fleshy belly flopping over his corpulent thighs. Instead of Operation I received a board game called Kelione i Lietuva, or Journey to Lithuania. The game consisted of a large dark-green map of Lithuania with a series of penciled-in roads connecting one city of Lithuania to another. Game pieces were not clever little dogs or old-fashioned automobiles, but plastic pyramids. Kelione i Lietuva didn’t even come in a box; it was simply there, ready to be placed on the kitchen table at a moment’s notice, a further indication of its questionable status as a real toy.

Another disappointment occurred the Christmas I was in sixth grade. It was 1969, and Franco Zefirelli’s Romeo and Juliet had been released the previous year. Photographs of the two young stars, Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, appeared in every issue of Teen and Tiger Beat.  “A Time for Us,” the theme from the movie, played on every radio station in the country.  An album was even released, containing brief excerpts of dialogue and some of the famous monologues intertwined with the songs and music. The cover was a little risqué–Juliet gazing into the eyes of her bare-chested Romeo, her nakedness cleverly concealed by her long dark hair—but how could my parents object to Shakespeare? That Christmas Eve I held the magical, record-shaped package for a minute in my trembling hands, then slowly removed the dancing snowmen wrapping paper to find—Johnny Mathis Sings the Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet. Other great “hits” on the album included “Windmills of Your Mind” and “Theme from Love Story.” I don’t know if my parents ever understood both the safety of their choice and the danger—Mathis’ ambivalent sexuality and his soothing, semi-tenor bereft of overt sexual longing contrasted sharply with the songs themselves, so clearly “adult,” suggesting a world of smoky lounges where dispirited men and women attempted to assuage their loneliness and revive their fading youth with dry martinis and meaningless if pleasurable flirtations.

Just when my sister and I thought we were doomed to live lives of abject uncoolness, to be subjected to endless variations of Kelione i Lietuva, my parents would turn our little world around and get us what we had hinted at with no real hope of attainment: a Mr. Potato Head, an Easy-Bake Oven, a Twister.

Twister—the game where you “use your bodies as playing pieces”—burst onto the Sixties scene promising innocent fun and suggesting lascivious mischief. Television advertisements for Twister depicted a group of well-scrubbed, smiling teenagers sprawled across a big vinyl mat covered with six large circles of color. Players took turns twirling a spinner that indicated which body part was to touch which large dot. The stated objective of Twister was to remain the last person standing.

The commercial’s catchy refrain still echoes in my mind:

Right foot blue! (Clap clap clap.)

Left hand red! (Clap clap clap.)

For weeks before Christmas I went around the house chanting “Right foot blue! Left hand red!”

“Watt that you singing?” my father asked.

“It’s Twister! It’s what I want for Christmas!”

“She wants the Twister,” I overheard my father say to my mother one evening.

The burst of sunshine that briefly appeared on the horizon of my childhood dreams—the possibility of Twister—was clouded over by the likelihood that my parents would be unable to negotiate the complicated transaction involved in purchasing the game. I wanted to tell my parents “It’s just Twister. It’s not the Twister.” I imagined my father going to the toy store and asking for “the Twister,” the surly clerk responding that they carried no such item.

1967. Christmas Eve.

We are sitting in the living room, around the tasteful Douglas pine. The presents have been opened. The Vienna Choir Boys are parum-pa-pum-pumming with restraint, the slowest version of The Little Drummer Boy on record. My mother is cracking hazelnuts with a sterling silver nutcracker. A visitor, a stranger, a silent man with a deeply tanned face and well-worn pants and a nose as shiny and red as Rudolph’s sits next to my father on the brown corduroy sofa. The fact that he speaks not one word of English, that his few words of Lithuanian sound clipped and unnatural, makes me think  he does not belong here. The way he downs the shots of vodka my father generously offers although no one else is drinking—this, too, is unsettling.

The man is a sailor. He doesn’t look like any sailor I am familiar with, not Popeye the Sailor Man, nor the goofy Gilligan from Gilligan’s Island.

“Vladas has come to America seeking freedom and a better life,” my father says.

Why did he have to come seeking freedom and a better life at our house? I want to ask. My secret fear is he will move in with us and I will once again have to share a room with my sister. At best, he has ruined this special evening, sitting there like a kelmas—a bump on a log—oblivious to the shiny red and green and silver ornaments on the tree, the tinsel I had to beg my mother to buy.

“Show him your new game,” my father says.

“They don’t have Twister in Lithuania,” I explain sullenly.

“Yeah, they don’t even have Christmas,” my sister adds.

“Show him the Twister,” my father says firmly.

Not bothering to use the spinner, I angrily announce, “Right foot blue.”

As her arms flail about, my sister plants a large stockinged foot onto a blue circle.

It will be years before I understand the circumstances that brought Vladas from Lithuania to the dilapidated wharfs of the Chicago Port Authority to our house on 1520 S. 50^th Court. The realization will coincide with my own journey across the Atlantic to the country my parents fled in the aftermath of the Second World War. Relatives—my relatives, relatives of friends, friends of relatives—will write and request the same Western goods: jeans (they have to be Levis), aspirin (it has to be Bayer), coffee (Folger’s is best.) My cousin’s apartment building in Vilnius will have graffiti on the walls and broken concrete steps. The phones will be wire-tapped.

It will be years before I wonder what the sailor man was thinking as my sister and I twisted amidst the gilded wrapping paper, the Choir Boys beseeching us to fall on our knees. Was he picturing Klaipeda, that most international of Lithuanian cities, its streets paved with red brick, its bone-chilling winters, its week of summer—but what a week, with the Baltic warm enough for swimming? Was he contemplating the world he had left behind or the one he was entering, a world of overly heated apartments, a world with a language as tough as Lithuanian meat, a country where children asked and parents gave and gave?

Right foot blue.