merry christmas.

Does it feel like Christmas? I’m not sure I know what Christmas feels like. It changes by the year. This year I live in my own house with my own tree and my own nativity. It feels strange. Mark, Sidney and I are in Pittsburgh this year for Christmas, which is something I have never done, been away from the five Fickers and a golden retriever on Christmas morning. It is all very different, but it is Christmas. It is December twenty-fourth. I think maybe the hard part of growing up is figuring out where you fit.

But I have been pondering this “feeling of Christmas,” and it’s coming together.

In college, when I studied abroad, we backpacked in France, Switzerland and Austria. I wore flip flops—leather Rainbows—the whole time. This idiocy resulted in a stress fracture in the lower bone of my second toe on the right foot. It still hurts, especially in the winter. And the toe that I broke kicking the foot of my bed last year also hurts. They flare up in the winter when it’s cold. Our new house is the perfect house. It is old, though, and the floors are this beautiful railway station wood with staple marks. The floors are so cold that my feet are usually white by bed time. Well Mark and I celebrated Christmas with one gift apiece, our dog, and some Christmas music in the background the other night at the foot of our tree. And you know what he did? He got me these unbelievable Eskimo slippers from L.L. Bean. The suede moccasin type, with fur spilling out on the sides and through the stitching at the toe. For the first time, my toes don’t ache in the cold, because they’re warm and the faux fir cushions them. I forget about the little slivers in the bones when I’m wearing the slippers. I think this is the spirit of Christmas.



And we got this dog--as, if you read 2 posts ago, you know was a small step for humanity and a GIANT leap for Ginny--who has surprised me by being perhaps the best thing that has happened to me in a long time. I didn't realize how much I would love the never being alone, even when I'm writing at home in the afternoon and it is so quiet in the house because the heat is resting. Before, I would become so isolated in being alone in the silence of writing that I would have this unbelievable urge to SCREAM. Seriously, I would just want to yell to hear a sound in the house. Ever since Sidney came home, I don't have that because I talk to her periodically. I run ideas by her, tell her about my word choices for dialogue and narrative. She usually looks at me and sort of tilts her little head. She is an active listener and I am never alone now. I think this is the spirit of Christmas.



My iPod got stolen out of my car in October, which is obviously terrible, but my mom loaned me hers so I could listen to Christmas music all December. We had a dinner party on Monday and there was a leftover bottle of Cabernet. My sister got to go see Amy Grant in concert, singing the songs we grew up listening to all our lives for the entire month of December. We got a gorgeous 9-foot Fraser Fir from Food Lion for $29.99. Gift cards to restaurants in Winston-Salem so we can go out to eat! The recent remission of my awful case of post-novel writers block and the return of my muse, who is a small Irish man in my head. Three inches tall--material for another post another day. These are all the spirit of Christmas.

And Immanuel, God with us. That, chiefly, is the spirit of Christmas. Merry Christmas, and may the increase of His peace be with you this Christmas.