When someone asks me what my favorite gift ever was, it only takes a second for me to recall ... it was a late-'70s Barbie Dream House and not only was it the best gift I ever received, but it was literally one of the most important moments of my life.

I grew up in a large, poor family ... I was the youngest of five and a very lonely child. We lived in the country with no neighborhood kids to play with and my siblings were all too old to spend time with me, so I always felt very left out and out of place.  At home, I was bullied mercilessly by my older brother, I was always spoken over at the dinner table, and because I was much younger than the others, I was often left behind when my siblings headed off to parties and outings with friends and relatives. At school, I was always jealous of what the other kids had, as I never could get in on whatever it was that was new and hot. My dad supporting us as a self-employed electrician, money was very tight for our family of seven, and my mother's stock answer to everything my friends had (toys, clothes, etc.) was "we can't afford that", and her usual response when my siblings went somewhere I wasn't invited to was " someday it'll be your turn." "No" was a word that I was very well acquainted with.

Despite how lean things were the rest of the year, however, my parents absolutely always made sure to give us a wonderful Christmas. They might've had a hard time keeping the lights turned on some years, but we never missed having a tree to put them on, and always got at least a few of the items on our Christmas lists. My mother scrimped and saved all year — depositing a dollar here and there in her Christmas Club account — to make sure that happened.

Our Christmas morning tradition was to impatiently wait for my dad to wake up and make a pitcher of his favorite concentrated orange juice, and have a glass before going downstairs to turn the tree lights and Christmas records on. Our bedrooms were on the second floor and we weren't allowed to venture down until everything was set-up and dad gave us the okay. As I was the littlest, usually I was the last one to get down the crowded steps full of excited tots running for the loot, but one year for some reason my brother and sisters let me bound down the staircase first. As I got to the bottom and turned the corner into the direction of the gift-laden tree, I saw something I couldn't have ever imagined. There in front of the Christmas tree was a brand-new Barbie Dream House — all put together and with Roller-Skating Barbie and Ken lounging on the second-level patio. I cannot express to you how shocked (and delighted!) I was. For all the years of being denied things I wished for due to our rough economic situation, here was this incredible (and expensive) toy, the likes of which I'd never even asked for. I only had one Barbie before I got the Dream House and to be honest, even if I'd known of this wonderful toy's existence, I wouldn't have thought to ask for it ... it would've been too far out of reach.

I had always been a little embarrassed for kids from school to visit our house. On the outside it was a big beautiful A-frame that my dad had designed and was building himself by hand. But inside it took 17 years to finish ... with us living in it during various stages of incompletion (cement floors, exposed wall studs, etc.) and my parents even sleeping on a stack of drywall that got shorter and shorter as construction progressed. An original design of my dad's however, I never knew anyone else with a house like ours, so when Barbie and her dream home arrived that Christmas morning in the shape of our very own house, it was an absolute dream to say the least, and a wonderful detail that did not go unnoticed by that impressionable grade-schooler. I had been at a delicate crossroads that year — starting to heavily question the idea of Santa Claus,  beginning to put two and two together, all while wanting to still believe. So on Christmas morning, when there not only was a gift so out my family's financial reality, that was for me and not my siblings and something not even my rich friends ever got (and one that looked just like my very own home to boot!) I didn't have to question any more.

Years later, when I got out of college, and all the other kids were long gone, my parents retired and sold that wonderful house my dad built and moved abroad to do charity work. I also unfortunately no longer have the Barbie House ... I'd wanted to keep it to pass down to my kids someday, but my mother gave it away with the rest of my toys when I was 11 (a sore point between us even now), but to this day, I still get very choked up thinking about that moment when I bolted off the bottom step into our Christmas-morning family room and saw that treasure that Santa had left for me. For those who aren't sentimental or for whom an overpriced plastic toy is something easily purchased, this may seem like cheesy holiday nostalgia, but I think about that Barbie Dream House all the time — not just at the holidays — and I can absolutely pinpoint it as a major turning point in my life. I went to bed that Christmas Eve a depressed, poor, lonely, left-out kid in hand-me-down pajamas, with a clear understanding of the limits of what was possible (and probable) in life, and woke up to a possibility that I never could've dreamed of the night before.  And I can say without a doubt that those few seconds at the doorway to our old family room are the precise reason why I design Christmas wares (cards, etc.) for a living, and why every Christmas my friends and I forgo unnecessary gift-baskets for each other and instead fulfill as many New York Cares Winter Wishes gift requests for needy kids as we can possibly afford ... hopefully with a Barbie House or two in there, as it's obviously become a symbol of hope and magic for me. It's not about money or "things" ... but adulthood can be very difficult and disappointing, and reality can often be so grim, so if you can give kids as many glimpses at magic and surprises that you can ... that they can then carry with them throughout the rest of their lives, then Santa is alive in all of us. Nothing is too far out of reach to wish for. Sometimes you just have to turn a corner to find that out.

I don't have that old plastic house to pass down to my kids if I ever have any, but I hope that wish to keep believing in a better life you can't tangibly see in front of you is something more important I can leave to them anyway.