MindSpinner

When I was a girl living in the mountains, Christmas came twice. It came Christmas morning with the opening of a scandalous number of packages under a tree adorned with 600 ornaments, but it came quietly the midnight before, too, when I would rise from my bed in my little girl’s room, light a small white candle, and watch the stars at the window, the horse sleeping in the pasture below, the silhouette of the apple tree. Christmas came in the quiet of midnight, in the flame of an ordinary white candle, in waiting and wordless silence, in just breathing all that is.

Now Christmas is fragmented across households, and because I have the children more of the rest of the time, they spend time with their father over holidays. This Christmas will be quieter still, for I am ill - able to get about the house, but no better. There won’t be a trip with the kids to my childhood home in the mountains; instead there will be a test or two to be run as soon as doctors return to their offices after the holiday. So it will be a different sort of Christmas. I’m picking out books to keep near my bed, for if there is a silver lining to illness, it is that you really do have to ignore the house chores you should otherwise be doing. I’m settling in to finish a book long interrupted, and I’m eyeing the fattest, yet untasted volume on the shelf. I won’t say I wasn’t moping about the bad timing for an illness and for that Christmas filled with feast, family, and bustle that isn’t going to be, but I’m settling into the idea of opening whatever gifts Christmas brings.