It’s
7 o’clock on Christmas morning. The
house is still asleep. Outside a milky
blue glow to the east silhouettes the trees and telephone poles. No snow this year. Just an icy stillness beyond the windows. I am the first one up, as always, so I have
already played Santa and stuffed the stockings that now hang distended from the
mantle. In a few hours all the packages
underneath the tree will have been opened, their wrappings scattered about for
the cat to play with. But for now, there
is a look of perfection, a kind of symmetry in all the squares, rectangles and
oddly shaped bundles under the tree.
The
silence of winter, The memories gathered
over seventy Christmases. Yuletides in
the desert. Yuletides by the sea. And the almost ancient family ones in the
heart of suburbia, when petty differences and misunderstandings were
temporarily set aside for the laughter and comfort of home. And mom was Mom. And dad was Dad. And the siblings were not a nuisance but
necessary cogs in the familial wheel.
The
lites shine brightly this morning in spite of the decades. Each ornament seems to have its own story so
that the tree becomes an anthology of little vignettes and events, bound by the
turning earth and all the people I love and have loved, and all the places I have
been like this one, with a decorated tree in a corner of the room, on a cold
morning in December and the beginning of another winter.
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