Let It Snow!

December 27, 2024

I looked everywhere but I couldn’t find it.

It wasn’t in the jumble of decorations packed away from last year. Nor in the Advent calendar hanging by the stairs. It wasn’t in the recipe file with its pink index cards graced by my mother’s slanted script. And it definitely was not hiding in the words to the songs playing on an endless loop.

Alas, my Christmas spirit was nowhere to be found. Perhaps it had been spirited away by too many ghosts of Christmases past. Or crushed in the clutter of too-muchness, the over-the-top greed fest that has come to be the holiday season.

How I longed to find it again! I took out the photo albums and saw our smiling faces in those simple years when we had so much less and wanted so much more. When the kids were small, and making Christmas memories was all that mattered. When life was hard but everything still felt possible.

I decorated the tree. Lit candles. I went to the village square on a cold clear night to hear the children sing carols. Gave to the local food drive. I felt a flicker here, a glow there. Still no tingle of excitement, no surge of Christmas spirit.

I baked cookies. Planned menus. Shopped, wrapped gifts. Began to look forward to having the family together again. Was that it? Had the old holiday spirit simply morphed into the act of anticipating, looking forward?

And then something happened.

The sky grew dark and the clouds drew in. The first big fat flakes began to fall. And fall and fall and fall. By the time the streetlights came on last night, the wind was blowing them steadily slantwise. We woke up this morning to a blanket of white, and still it continues to pile up.

I cannot say why this fills me with joy. It’s not like it’s entirely unexpected, living in the Alps. But it didn’t happen last year, or the year before. In fact, in the 30 years since we left Canada I can count the number of times we’ve had a white Christmas on one hand. Now I can almost hear the sleigh bells. And I think my Christmas spirit is in one of the snow drifts just beyond my window.

Joyeux Noël!

Encore this post!

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Mel L

I hail from Toronto, Canada but have lived more than half of my life abroad – from the US to France and now a sunny corner of the Swiss Alps.
My first job as a copywriter was to edit my unwieldy first name into something more like me: short and to the point. So it was that I morphed from Mary Ellen into Mel.
My love of language began with English and now extends to French along with a soupçon of German.
My writing? From fiction to memoir, it’s often irreverent, sometimes funny and occasionally moving. Always character-driven.