The little family was already so busy that December night with so many tweets to send and YouTube videos to watch.
But when the clocks on their iPhones turned to 5:45, the children turned to the mother and said, "Can we go, Mom? Please?"
They hopped in the car and drove the three minutes to the center of their little town, then hurriedly ran toward the railroad stop on Main Street, just as the whistle of the train began to blow and and the carolers begin to sing, "We Wish You a Merry Christmas."
Arms linked, surprised by the excitement they felt, they threw their heads back and laughed as they nervously waited with the other children and families of the town for the most important man on Earth.
Not Donald Trump. For once, it wasn't Donald Trump.
It was Santa, come riding into town on the bedecked Christmas train, waving at all the good little girls and boys in their reindeer antlers and their sweaters of red and green. The man of the hour ho-ho-hoed a few times and, with a wink of his eye and a twist of his head, ordered ablaze the Christmas lights on the trees and lampposts to warm the hearts of the townspeople from now until the groundhog comes in February.
So Christmas-y magical was the moment, the mom gleefully exclaimed, "I feel like we're in a Christmas movie!"
But actually, the moment was real, as real as Santa's whiskers on the "Miracle on 34th Street." I know because I was, I am, that mom. And those were my children, way too big now to sit on Santa's lap, but children of Christmas nonetheless.
It occurred to me then that movie producers aren't the originators of Hallmark moments. Regular people are.
On another night nearing Christmas, my family was again busy and overstretched. The kitchen was a mess as we worked to pull together a quick dinner after a long day. Nobody was inspired. And so I asked the kids to finish the pasta while I cleared the cluttered table. I spread a clean Christmas tablecloth, got out the chipped Christmas-tree plates and a few candles, and swept the floor. In just a few minutes, the chaos of a cramped kitchen on a gray December night in northeast Ohio was transformed into a Pinterest post.
It's old hat now, the overblown Oprah-ized admonition to "Live in the moment." I can't always seem to get there. But I know where the moments are, especially at Christmas, especially important at the end of an especially hard year, punctuated by a bitter presidential election, and with so much uncertainty and division lurking in the new year.
We all need a little Christmas.
Not 24-7. I can't live in a Pinterest post all 2.6 million seconds of December. What I can live into is the promise of moments, wrought of memory, begotten by feelings that began in childhood, the security of watching my mother making fruit cake and bourbon balls year after year. My today's Christmas is reminiscent of the thrill of seeing a new bicycle in the living room on Christmas morning. It is a makeover of one Christmas Eve when, I'm still sure to this day, I heard sleigh bells on the roof. It is the remembered excitement of secrets behind my mother's door and the comfort of my great grandmother's house on Christmas night. It is the resonance of family gathered at midnight Mass, my three sisters and me singing next to our mother, and for this service, my father, too, a Southern Methodist who didn't enter a Catholic church except for weddings and funerals. And mass on Christmas Eve.
Every Christmas, I find these feelings again. Not every second. I can't sit every minute in the living room singing along with The Vienna Boys Choir, while meditating on the Christmas tree, which this year, my daughter's boyfriend deemed a "Christmas bush." Haphazardly lopped off at the top, our tree with its tiny blue lights does indeed appear this year less like a Christmas tree and more like a blueberry bush. Part of Christmas is imperfection, stress and disappointment. Just like part of life is.
But Christmas, like no other time, brings access to a multitude of moments that come with my creation or when I simply stop for half a second to bring them into awareness.
It's as simple as unwrapping a peppermint cane and popping it into my 19-year-old's hot chocolate.
Or fully experiencing both giver and receiver, when my family delivers a turkey to a homeless shelter.
It is as deliberate as a trio of grown-ups who stop the rigors and routines of the maddening day to run downtown and be as children again.
And as simple as a fresh tablecloth, fluffed in the cacophony of a busy kitchen.
Christmas is an opportunity. Not to obsessively cull out every morsel of Christmas there is, but to squeeze out every drop of Christmas magic there is to be had.
Christmas is, as much as anything, a symbol of hope.
It is a reminder of the unceasing human capacity to find light, even in winter's deepest dusk.
