Beth Thompson

It was an impossibly springlike February day when I found myself walking the beach, when I found her. Both beauty and new friends often come to us this way I think: in unlikely circumstances, unexpected

There are so many things not ok in our world today, this day, Christmas Eve. All I know is that things in that manger were not ok. Kids who failed to plan adequately for a big trip, as their long-in-the-tooth parents would have, and probably suggested before they left. It was not even meant to be celebrated amidst the ok.

The truth is that I do not know, anymore, what my son most needs in his day-to-day life, what he might have mentioned casually, in passing, that he could use. We have written tags on Santa packages in loopy, oversized cursive so elaborate that even skeptical children declare that it is not Mom’s handwriting at all, they know what that looks like, and that Santa himself must have written their name right here on this paper! And as we sat together, our hearts broken but still and again beating together, just as they had so many years before, I would tell them the whole grown up truth: that the magic of being Santa is perhaps the single thing in the whole world better than believing in Santa. Neither the skill set nor the resume, the vestiges of my years as Santa, are good for much now; I know.

The Christmas season kicked off, when we were small, not with Black Friday, or even with the first Sunday of Advent, so much as with the hunt for the little door with the number 1 on the Advent calendar. The design on the front–a Christmas tree, Santa on his sleigh, or the Nativity scene-could make it hard to find the perforated lines of the tiny doors, the impossibly small black numbers. Advent calendars have been around a long time; I guess folks have long known how hard it is for children to wait. It was probably not one of the lofty elders of the church, the ones who have so often insisted–in ill-advised lectures to weary and secretly eye-rolling mothers–that it was their children’s insufficient understanding of the ecclesiastical marvel of the Prophecy Fulfilled that made the waiting so hard.