The Glass Castle

The Walls celebrated Christmas about a week after the official holiday. They picked up discarded Christmas items and shopped for gifts that had undergone massive markdowns.

We celebrated Christmas, but usually about a week after December 25, when you could find perfectly good bows and wrapping paper that people had thrown away and Christmas trees discarded on the roadside that still had most of their needles and even some silver tinsel hanging on them. Mom and Dad would give us a bag of marbles or a doll or a slingshot that had been marked way down in an afterChristmas sale.