Merry Christmas!

Driving home from my sister Shelia's tonight I was remembering what it felt like on Christmas Eve as a little kid, how we were too excited to sleep, not just because of Santa's impending arrival but because everyone was home. The house was decorated to the nth degree, Nat King Cole's Christmas LP playing in the background with all its scratching and popping. Anticipation has always been the best part of anything I ever do, and it started way back then. Christmas is for kids, at least that part of Christmas, and as much as it has changed over the years in my world, that feeling still lingers.

I don't decorate the house, I don't put up a tree, you can't really tell by walking into my casita that it is, in fact, the holiday season, but the memory is there. The house smelling like evergreen, the ten angel candleholders on the piano, that plastic poinsettia garland on the stair railing, the nativity in the upstairs fireplace. A big blanket over the unwrapped presents in my parents' bedroom. Sitting in the living room telling stories we'd heard a thousand times - Shelia and Barbie and the milkshake debaucle, Chris and "his" dog Pepper. Always a house full of people.

I'm a lot more solitary these days, so the memory of it is enough, but now when there are only a few of us around for the holidays it still doesn't feel quite right. Until I remember. Remembering is good.

Merry Christmas to my seventeen readers, where ever you may find yourself tonight.