Christmas Memory

I'm not a summer person and I never really was. I don't look forward to summer anymore. I look forward to winter. Summer is too hot and too humid and too noisy for me, especially now that I'm older. My favorite season is fall — and it always was — and then winter, and some of my favorite cold-weather memories are about Christmas.

There hasn't been anything under my Christmas tree except the tree stand for the past five or six years but Christmas presents are not the reasons I still put up a tree every year in the den, right in front of the big sliding-glass door that opens onto the big back "patio/porch".

The biggest reason for putting up a Christmas tree is to share the experience of looking at it with someone you care about and who needs to feel happy and cheerful about beautiful bright lights and a warm, safe home. And I get to do that every year. That's my Christmas present. Sharing the cheerful bright tree lights and feeling good about the most beautiful holiday of the year. That's why I never watch the Hallmark Channel. I like to be happy at Christmas. Not sad.

And, no, this isn't a painting by Edvard Munch. And this is not the way my hometown really looked when they strung all those big colored light bulbs back and forth across the main street downtown, when I was just a boy. This is how it looks whenever I try to remember it. The best Christmas is always the present one and then the next one.