… and this – blurry, with shredded gift paper and monsters – pretty much sums it up.

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

– Rainier Maria Rilke, A Walk.

A wish for the new year, for myself, and my loved ones, and everyone: to answer our own waves, all of us. And to grasp, or seek to grasp, that which we cannot grasp, and to let ourselves be changed. And through all of it, always, to feel the wind on our faces, to let it blow our hair and kiss our cheeks and to love it, to welcome it, even when it stings.

In our little town, there is a charming little main street filled with antique stores and specialty shops and charming little cafes – two of them – at which you can buy lattes and cappuccinos and pots of tea with cookies on the side and sit at little round tables and have quiet, gentle conversations while watching people bustle about on the street outside. And if you head east on this street, down a block or two, just past the wellness centre (now with yoga classes!) and the office of the local Minister of Parliament, and then a few paces further, you will find another place to buy coffee, although you wouldn’t call it a café. It’s not the kind of place where you can get a latte or tea in tea cups with cookies on the side; you order your coffee ‘extra-large regular’ and maybe you get a donut on the side.

The regulars here don’t huddle over biscotti while taking a break from shopping; they gather outside near a wastebin filled with sand that they use as an ashtray, and talk and smoke and smoke and talk and when it gets really cold they consume their cigarettes in fast, furious bursts, inhaling deeply and quickly so that the tips glow bright red in the cold air, before ducking back inside and gathering in small groups around the tables and talking about this or that or nothing. Most of them come from ‘The Home’ around the corner, a residence for people who have gotten lost in the province’s mental health system and have no family to pull them out or take them in and so they live at ‘The Home’ and spend their days at the local coffee shop, alongside a handful of others who, for reasons of unemployment and/or addiction and/or mental health issues, take up the tables for the better part of the day, every day.

We go there sometimes, Emilia and I, because she likes the donuts with the sprinkles and I like their bagels with peameal bacon and cheddar and because sometimes you just want a coffee ‘extra large regular’ instead of a ristretto non-fat latte. Everyone always says hello, and someone always asks Emilia about school and she always lets the lady called Alice – one of our neighbours calls her Crazy Alice, which is unkind but not entirely inaccurate – pat her on the head and tell her that she’s pretty, which is something that she is disinclined to tolerate from others, especially when she does not have a sprinkle donut in her hand.

Two days before Christmas, we went there, but we didn’t buy coffee or donuts or chat with the regulars. We waited until there was no-one else near the counter, and then asked to speak to the owner.

“He’s not in,” said the lady behind the counter, the one who sometimes slips an extra sprinkle donut into Emilia’s bag. “He went home early because he’ll be in all day tomorrow and Christmas Day.”

“Could I ask you to pass something on to him? It’s a little weird.” I handed her an envelope. “I’d like to buy coffee and donuts for anyone who comes in on Christmas Day. I don’t know how many people will be in, but I hope this” – I gestured to the envelope – “will be enough.”

She looked inside. “It’s more than enough. It’ll just be the regulars. They have nowhere else to go. We’re the only place that’s…”

“…open on Christmas Day. I know. So if there’s more, maybe add sandwiches for whoever wants them? Or whatever they want. Whatever it covers.”

I know that this will read as clichéd, but still: her eyes filled up with tears. “They don’t have anywhere to go at Christmas,” she said. “They just come here.”

Emilia tugged at my arm. “Can I have a donut?”

It wasn’t a big thing, what we did – and it was, I should note, prompted by Yahoo’s Ripples Of Kindness (they made a contribution that covered half of my little Christmas Coffee gift) – but I think that it might have made for a nice holiday surprise for some people who usually don’t get holiday surprises, people for whom Christmas Day is a day for forgetting that it’s Christmas Day. I hope so, anyway.

The whole exercise, though, was more of a gift for me than it was a gift for anyone else. It was reminder that little things that make a little difference can go a really long way to making one feel hopeful about the world. The bigger stuff – working to raise awareness of and support for programs fighting HIV or wearing tutus and granting wishes and raising money for muscular dystrophy or advocating for families of premature babies or raising awareness of the challenges facing families of children with special needs or making sure that some needy families get Christmas or just generally trying to do as much good as we can – make our hearts swell and our souls lift and give us bigger hope for bigger things. They help us to believe that it is possible to make the world a better place in measurable ways. But they also, sometimes, remind us of how much work there still is to do, of how far we are from eliminating HIV and curing muscular dystrophy and eliminating poverty and fulfilling all the wishes that should be fulfilled and ensuring that disabled children live rich and fulfilling lives and that premature babies live, and it can all feel, you know, overwhelming and impossible, at times, when you think of how all of efforts really just chip away at that stuff, that mountain of bad stuff and sad stuff and stuff that we maybe just can’t fix, not in our lifetimes, anyway.

But when you do something little – sure, you could buy coffee and sandwiches for 40 people who will have no Christmas dinner, but you could also buy coffee and a sandwich for one person who just happens to look a little lonely – and that little something causes someone to smile and to feel a little better about the world, it makes you feel – it made me feel – that changing the world really is possible, even when – maybe especially when – we’re all taking the smallest baby steps toward that change.

It’s possible to say, of course, that everything I’ve said above is just a puffed-up and self-important way of saying, doing nice things makes you feel good, and doing nice things makes the world a nicer place, and that would be entirely true, but still. It all reduces to the same thing: little things can make a big difference. It’s important that we keep reminding ourselves of that, and that we then remind ourselves again. And again and again and again and again.

At that we then get ourselves a donut, with extra sprinkles.

(I’m so sorry that I have to keep comments closed. I’m back west with my family – and with Tanner – and things are challenging and distracting and I have limited access to wi-fi, so. I’m just not able to monitor comments and participate in discussion. If you’ve done something sprinkle-donut-worthy, tweet me or post about it Facebook and tag me so that I can read about it. I’d love it if you did. I need the boost.)

… he rested.

Merry Christmas, you guys. Here’s some joy for you:

(This was two years ago, which, it should be noted, was one year before Glee debuted. Emilia, obviously, was ahead of the curve.) (This year she did ‘Oh Holy Night’ with synthesizers, but unfortunately, I didn’t get it on video. You’ll just have to use your imagination.)

(We’re in British Columbia for the holiday – we arrived, nerve-rattled but safe, mostly, yesterday – and are hunkering down with family and drinking rum and eggnog. I hope that you’re doing something comparably heart-nourishing.)

(Happy, happy, holidays to you. The happiest.)

The snow is lovely, bright and deep / but she has promises to keep / and miles to go before she sleeps / and miles to go before she sleeps.

Frost’s classic poem is, of course, haunting in its original form, but is it any more haunting than a cold winter afternoon spent trying to entertain candy-cane-jacked, snow-mad kindergarteners who have already declared that they are ‘NOT SLEEPING UNTIL SANTA COMES MOMMY YOU CAN’T MAKE ME’? Is it? IS IT?

It is not. Apologies to Frost, and to any poet who insist that mortality is a darker and more haunting theme than is the batshittery of children at Christmastime, but no, it is not.

*****

That photo was taken with my much-beloved Nikon, and then buffed and tweaked and decorated in Piknik, and will be cross-posted to Intel Canada’s Facebook page as an example of capturing your children in their funniest moments – in their funny and decidedly batshit moments – during the holidays. They have a contest going on right now and through the holidays (remember?) and you can upload your own photos and videos and win cool stuff. You like cool stuff.

Also, you can watch me be a know-it-all on video. If you prefer to watch me being more of an idiot, you can just watch this:

Which is really an excellent lead-in to asking you to vote for me for this here thingamaward. Unless extreme dorkitude really puts you off, in which case I played that hand badly. Oh, well.

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.

I wanted this year to start with laughter and smiles and cookies and fizzy soda. I didn’t want confetti and champagne and fireworks and streamers – I just wanted smiling. I just wanted this year to start happy.

I’m still trying to find the happy. Yes, my heart lifts when I hug my children and my lips curve when they giggle but the last week of last year and the first week of this year have been covered in a thick blanket of fever and snot and heartache and it’s been hard to find the laughter. And although Nyquil takes the edge off the fever and snot, there aren’t sufficient meds for heartache, Ativan and Xanax notwithstanding. Last week was much, much harder than I thought it would be – doing the final clean-up of my dad’s place in the week between Christmas and New Year’s was, in hindsight, less than ideal timing. Coping with the heart-punches of the holidays was difficult enough without throwing myself into the line of fire of the gut-kicks and soul-wedgies that came with seeing the last of his things carted away, his home wiped clean of his presence.

I feel like I’m grieving anew. And I feel like I’m grieving out of pace with how I should, out of pace with what is expected. Which shouldn’t matter, but it does, because I have to account for myself, I have work to do, I have responsibilities, and there’s a limit to how much space I can carve out for these depressions before the voices – mine, others – say, isn’t that enough? Get on with your life.

There’s a limit to how much I can say about all this – how much dark poetry I can attempt to wring from all this – before it gets old and tiresome and done. I know that grief doesn’t follow a schedule, but I also know that one shouldn’t dwell in grief indefinitely. There’s time for grief, and there’s time for letting go of grief, and I simply don’t know the measure between these.

Maybe it’s just the fever. Maybe I’ll feel better once the fog lifts and I feel strong again.

Or maybe Emilia just needs to keep adding to her Blair SnowWitch Project in the backyard until I get spooked out of my malaise. That could work, too.

Last night, I was writing a post about having had a particularly bad day while Christmas shopping. It was a post about struggling with grief over the holidays, about the heartache that comes in those moments when you’ve gotten caught up in the holiday spirit and forgotten that something – that someone – is missing and then you suddenly remember and OOF. It was a post – again, again – about my dad. I was struggling to write it. I was wondering, as I always do, why I persist. I was feeling sad.

As I was agonizing over it, I heard a small voice from the other room, singing, in very high, measured tones, hallelujah.

Hallelujah, Hallelejuha… Hallelujah, Hal-lay-yoo-oo-oo-ooooooo-yah

Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah is a song that my dad loved, a song that I’ve played a very few times since his death, because it tugs at my heart in a way that I am not always prepared to embrace. A few times, now and again, once or twice in Emilia’s presence. The last time, maybe, a couple of weeks ago, when she and I had been choreographing routines to the Glee cover of Don’t Stop Believin’ and it came on after the shuffle and I stopped and moved away from her and sat on the sofa to listen, and to cry. Are you crying because it’s pretty, Mommy, she asked.

Yes, sweetie, I said. And because it reminds me of your Grandpa.

– And because it’s pretty. He liked it because it’s pretty.

Something like that, I said.

That was two weeks ago, maybe three. Now she was making it her own. My heart clenched and swelled and swelled and clenched – yes, it can do those things all at once – as I listened to her.

Hallelujah… Hal-lay-LOO-OO-OO-OO-YAH. Her voice soared and trilled.

That’s a nice song, I said.

-- Yeah. I like it because it’s pretty. It’s a Christmas carol.

Oh, yeah?

– Yeah. Can we go carolling? And sing this carol?

Maybe. Why this one?

– It came into my heart. I can sing it another way, too.

Oh, yeah? I braced myself. Would this be the version dedicated to Grandpa at his Death House in Heaven? Would this be the one with lyrics spun to reflect Mommy’s sadness? Had I, in my grief, created a four year old Leonard Cohen who would be bent on ringing in Christmas with dirge-like ballads?

She began to sing.

Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hal-lay-POO-yah, Hal-lay-POO-OO-OO-OO-yah.

I laughed.

– I knew that I could make you laugh, Mommy. Because I do FUN carols.

You do, baby. You do.

And right then, I knew. Christmas is going to be okay. Because I have them, because I have her. It’s going to be okay. Better than okay. It’s going to be fun.

Hal-lay-POO-YAH and all.

****

Meanwhile, elsewhere in my world: that post that I mentioned above, that reflects upon grief, yes, but also on how I overcame that grief, and what an owl has to do with it. And, a few of my favorite things, and not a warm woolen mitten among them. Also, cookies. Or not.

Because, when I’m not looking, he makes our daughter a Christmas suit out of foil wrapping paper and dresses her in it.

And then, suitably attired, they sit down for cocoa with marshmallows and smashed candy canes, and when I say to myself, this is golden, it is true both literally and figuratively. And my heart shimmers like her Christmas Suit, and life is good.

He gives me this. This is better than the bounty of a thousand Santas.