Marcy’s vacation week offers a holiday column excerpted from her book, Rounding Third … originally from 2006.

Christmastime is pure nostalgia.

Many of my holiday memories began with our children’s arrival. I will never forget the total exhaustion of falling into bed after filling the last stocking and cleaning up the toy construction evidence. The elves who visited our house weren’t super handy or organized.

Depending on how successful last-minute wrapping and battery searches were, bedtime followed – during a lucky year at 2:00am. Often much later. I never felt as stringy as when awakening to excited whispers and the patter of little feet. On 45 minutes sleep.

Reminiscing about Christmas morning lost sleep harkens back to my childhood and what it must have been like for my mother. My father’s only Christmas presence involved a post-holiday visit, so Christmas was totally up to Mom. Since she worked two full-time jobs, she must have managed lunch hour Christmas shopping followed by late night wrapping.

Evening shopping was just Fridays, and never on Sunday. The only catalogue was Sears Roebuck, and no one had ever heard of a mall. I’m pretty sure that all my presents came from the two square blocks of Washington Street in our small Massachusetts town.

Like most kids then, I pressed my nose to the store windows, especially the “big present” displays at Western Auto – you know, the wagons and trains and such. Occasionally I dared to enter that grownups’ emporium, although they tolerated us kids.

Western Auto’s windows the year I was nine, held a ruby red two-wheeler with a basket and a bell. And be still my heart, it was a girl’s bike, without the bar. Mr. Glennon let me sit astride it and I could reach the pedals! He patiently let me ring the bell, squeezing the metal tab “cha-ching.”

I went to sleep for weeks picturing myself on that magnificent velocipede. I imagined myself lording it over the rotten neighborhood boys and winning the races down Pearl Street for years to come. Being the only girl my age in an all-boy neighborhood had turned me into a competitive tomboy, but I suffered as the only kid on the block without a “big bike.” Many of the boys’ hand-me-down wrecks had rusty handlebars and patched tires, but they had big kid bikes and I didn’t. I was desperate. And just think, If I had a new, red bicycle …. My mind boggled at the possibilities.

The weeks to Christmas ground down. Mom hauled home a tree, and we decorated it with new Snow White lights, colored paper chains and lots of tinsel.

Day after day, a few new gifts wrapped in white butcher’s paper adorned with colorful stickers appeared under the tree. A few had my name on them. I suppose the average kid would have been excited to watch the pile grow, but the more that arrived under the tree, the more I got discouraged.

There could be no chance of a gleaming two-wheeler as the present count passed 3, then 5.

On Christmas Eve, I hung my stocking and went to bed, wondering what might be in the boxes. Morning always brought some surprise packages from Santa, although his handwriting looked a lot like Mom’s.

Deep down, I knew that the bike wasn’t possible and sometime before finally drifting off, I remember feeling guilty that I wanted it so bad. Nine must have been an age of moral awakening, because I realized that my mother’s second job and Santa’s ability to produce a two-wheeler were linked in some way.

To this day, I remember waking up between 4 and 5 that Christmas morning. It’s possible that the sound awakening me was my mother collapsing into bed in the next room. I snuck through our apartment into the living room and there, silhouetted in the half-glow from the streetlight, was a two-wheeler with a basket and bell. I somehow swallowed the screech in my throat. But I did run into Mom’s room and crawl in beside her whispering excitedly, “He came, he came, he came”.

“That’s nice,” she muttered, exhausted, and we both went back to sleep.

In the light of Christmas Day, it wasn’t red, it was blue. And it wasn’t Western Auto shiny; it was gently used. The bell stuck a little, too, but it didn’t matter. The bicycle, to me, was perfect – easily equivalent to Ralphie’s Red Ryder gun in “The Christmas Story” movie. Each was the most wonderful present ever. As usual, Mom had found a way to fulfill my dreams.

It wasn’t too many years before I realized the degree of my mother’s sacrifices, the lost sleep, the long hours, the aching back, the passed-over luxuries. In the length of my life, the hours and days of all her gifts to me are still somehow symbolized by the world’s best bicycle.

My own “Christmas Story” lives on in my memory, a testament to a mother’s devotion. And she never quit.

Marcy O’Brien writes from Warren, Pa.