Believing, Still

The daydreams always circle back to one thought: at Christmas, so many hidden things—like breath to the air—are made purely clear.

- Jaimien Delp

One of the first Christmas gifts I have a vividly clear memory of is clouds. I woke that morning to find the pale blue of my bedroom transformed; afloat all around me were sweeping curves of white that appeared, in my imagination, to move throughout the entire room. At a time when most of my waking hours were spent leaping off the back of the sofa or jumping from swings into snow banks trying to reenact the scene in Peter Pan where the children learn to fly, Santa had opened the sky for me. It was the gift of belief.

This opening of worlds—the admittance into secret places filled with living objects only the heart knew how to find—surrounded my childhood, and Christmas was the apex. When we went to Caszatt’s tree farm every year, stepping into the beauty of snow-tipped pines felt like being transported into another world, and downtown Traverse City became a smaller version of the North Pole, with watchful elves hiding around every corner, a reindeer sighting entirely plausible, everyone thinking how best to bring joy to someone else. Even Britty, my childhood dog, appeared to see something more than snowfall while she sat, golden and intent by the window, looking out at the December nights.