Christmas came and went as though it didn't exist, except that my Father and Marie sent Sarah and I gold necklaces with pendants. The pendants were stars of David. In the center of the star was a cross. They were beautiful and I loved my necklace, but Mom didn't like the crosses; crosses were evil pagan symbols. She told us to call our Father and complain about his gifts, to see if he could send us some without the crosses. I hated making that phone call. She stood nearby and wrote stuff down that we had to say. Finally he told us to send the necklaces back to him; we did. Mom told me that it was just as well, because gold wasn't my color anyway. I was only allowed to wear things that were silver in color. I felt sickened about the rejected gifts. I knew it must have hurt his feelings. Mom made us write letters to our entire family begging them not to send us presents for our birthdays or Christmas and frankly, after this incident, it wasn't hard to do.

We had very few clothes, and what we did have tended to be in bad condition, especially if the clothes were used to work outside in. My jeans were consistently wearing out at the knees and thighs (from lifting rounds of firewood onto my thighs to get them up to torso/chest height to carry). We had limited winter clothing, and now that winter had come, riding in the back of the truck had become quite the chilling experience, especially when we hauled water. The barrels would slosh any water from their rims onto us, and we didn't have blankets to protect us from the wind, either. Socks and underwear were limited commodities, and the flannel shirts i worked in....well, they were worn to the point of being the thickness of toilet paper.

I mean, we coped with these obstacles. When we worked outside, we routinely wore long underwear, two or three pairs of socks, and two pairs of jeans, and long underwear, flannel shirts, a wool sweater or sweatshirt under our coats. The only gloves we had were work gloves, the cotton type with black rubber dots on the palm side. When we working in the slush or the rain or worst of all, freezing rain, the gloves were nearly worthless, useful only for keeping splinters and abrasions at bay. Most of the gloves had holes in the fingertips, but they were still better than nothing at all. I was lucky to have the same pair of thin leather gloves (I think they were for golfing or riding?) I'd neglected to wear for my journey out the 2nd floor window via a rope. Their smooth surface didn't collect snow and slush. They weren't very warm, but they were better than what Dad called the "dot gloves".

Grandma Amy sent us new clothes sometimes. We went absolutely wild over her care packages. Other than that, our main sources of clothing were hand me downs from other people and the Coolin landfill. We scoured the dump every time we got to go. Raphah and I were sorely disappointed when Dad wouldn't take us. If he did take us, we had to repay it by picking up 26 aluminum cans, which was his estimation of compensation for the gas.

Once we were there looking for anything good when a car drove up. The guy inside it opened a door, unloaded several cats, and sped off. Some of them tried to run after his vehicle. I couldn't believe anyone would do such a thing, and Eliyah seemed upset over it too. We caught two of the cats and I went calling another one, but it ran into the woods and I couldn't get it. The two we brought back were both long haired tabbies, a male and female, and the female, Colette, became mine. The other....I can't remember his name so I'll call him Romeo, was more of a family cat. Colette was extremely affectionate and had bewitching green eyes. She had this habit of sashaying up to me, gazing up lovingly, and meowing with all the charm in the world right before digging her claws in and climbing up my leg. It was lucky that I wore the 3+ layers of clothing (which also was a good defense against toothpicks)! She'd ride on my shoulders once she'd ascended my body. I probably should have discouraged her, but really did not mind very much. I finally had a cat again.

Although Verna remained puzzled by what had become of the baby Mom was supposed to have (this was a recurring and embarrassing question put to us by other people, that we did not know how to answer), she contacted her niece about the kids in our family and our clothing situation. It seems that her niece had some sort of access to free clothing that was brand new and hadn't sold, or something like that. We were absolutely stunned when we received two huge freight boxes packed solidly with clothing for us. Nothing like this had ever happened to us before. We were used to picking through the landfill, and would have been delighted with a trip to a thrift store with a dollar or two for each child to spend. To receive this much nice, new clothing was truly surreal. It was so surreal that Yahweh quickly informed us that he would help us decide who got what. It took us days to go through all that clothing. The funny thing of it was, there was almost no clothing at all for Dad. Yahweh said that this was some sort of an indication of Dad's devotion, or lack of it, and our persistence in hoping and praying for clothing. Even now, this strikes me as terribly funny and accurate.