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20 Dec

Bring Us Goodness And Light

I love Christmas. I love it with the fiery heat of a blazing winter fire and a million twinkling fairy lights. I love the sparkle and the twinkle and the plum pudding and the eggnog and the tinsel and the gift wrap and the stockings and the carols and the hymns and the stories, all the stories, every single one, from the manger to the magi to old St. Nicholas to the Grinch (spare me the pieties about not telling tales to children. A childhood without the magic of stories, woven so brilliantly as to obscure the lines between fact and fiction, make-believe and make-of-that-what-you-will, is no childhood at all, in my opinion.) I love it, all of it, the snow-globe perfection of it, the gentle sheen of protective glass over perfect, brilliant moments in time, the way that it can just take one such moment – a moment in which the crackle of the fire makes you feel perfectly, contentedly warm; the flash of belief in a child’s eyes when you tell her that the jingling of bells that she hears is the music of flying reindeer; the fleeting frost-kiss that is a snowflake landing on your cheek – and make that moment expand almost infinitely and make you forget that outside the snow globe, life’s storms come pelt hail and bend your umbrella and soak your mitts.

I need that kind of forgetting. I’m finding it hard to find that kind of forgetting. There are cracks in our snowglobe – cracks that I can’t talk about, because this snowglobe contains more lives than just my own – cracks that threaten split and break and let all the rain in and all the glitter out and there just isn’t enough glue and duct tape in the world to guarantee that that won’t happen, there are no guarantees, and so I must just push forward and do what I can shield the glass over the heads of the children – my children, my sister’s children – and keep them in their own little globes of glitter and joy so that the storms can’t reach them. Or, at least, not reach them yet. They should at least have Christmas.

Because, Christmas. Jingle bells and carols and candy and presents and love and hymns and magi and starlight and little drummer persons, singing their hearts out with voices as big as the sea, keeping all the hurt at bay: we need that. We need that.

*****

I posted the questions (the soul-searching questions, nyuk) behind the tripped-out fairy-dorkmother-cum-inner-celestial-being portrait. I dare you to answer them yourself. (If you do, let me know. I need the smiles.)

Also: you should totally enter this contest. Because, look: I know that you have ten trillion photos and video clips stored up, and there’s got to be at least eleventeen there that could win you a prize. Just enter here, and then post the link to your entry at my post here, and then sit back and bask in your own awesome and see it garners you a Sony Bloggie, or better. And let me know what charitable organization in Canada should get an Intel notebook, and also earn karma points, or get on Santa’s nice list, or just feel good, or whatever.