White Christmas

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I loved Christmas as a child. It was the one day a year in my world where absolutely everything came to a halt. No one went to school, no one went to work, and everyone gathered around a lit tree with people they loved and exchanged gifts. I made a bit too much of the gifts, as a lot of kids are wont to do. There was so much I felt I wanted that I didn’t have access to, that I saw but couldn’t acquire, and this seemed the one day where the wanting and waiting and dreaming would finally end and there would only be having.

One of those things I wanted, however, was a White Christmas. The idea of it actually snowing Christmas morning, as it did in every single Hollywood Christmas movie I’d ever seen, seemed positively magical. Snow itself was like a gift to me; it could close school and change the landscape, making the world, for that brief lovely time before the plows came and the shovels were deployed, quietly new and fresh as a canvas. Unfortunately, you couldn’t put snow on your Christmas list. The normal mechanism of acquisition simply didn’t apply, and everyone, rich and poor, was subject to the same, indifferent governing power, which, in my lifetime, had kept that one desire stowed in dreamland.

I was eleven and could feel my lust for Christmas morning just beginning to wane. I remembered too clearly the strangely flat feeling once all the presents were opened the year before. Still, my brother, sister, and I were up early, up before my mom, before my dad found his way over, up in the still-wrapped darkness, feeding off each other’s anticipation. Felicie, my big sister, saw it first. You had to press your face against the kitchen window, but there it was in the streetlight’s glow, familiar and unmistakable, falling silent and steady.

We had to wake my mother to show her, leading her bleary-eyed to the window as if Santa’s sleigh itself was sitting on our lawn. Even her adult delight was real, and now we were all up, and we might as well open the stockings and bake the sweet rolls. I kept looking out the window, because now the day was growing light and you could see it from the living room floor, and it was going to be a true, cover-everything snowfall, one my dad had to drive through to get to us.

I glanced out the window even while we opened our presents, and I knew my brother and sister were thinking the same thing I was, that we wanted to get this over with so we could put on our boots and coats. There’s nothing like playing in the snow while it’s still falling, when you look back and see your tracks already starting to fill, when you see it landing on your sister’s eyelashes, in your brother’s hair. And there’s nothing like that moment, traipsing into the house, dripping and happy, just as you had after all the other snows, that you see the tree and the presents and you remember what day it is, and the lightness you feel seems like something you’ve always had.

If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual coaching and group workshops.

William KenowerComment