The narrow little house looked like a Christmas card.
Snow hung over the edge of the roof like a big white blanket all bunffled up on a bed.
A warm light and the merriest sounds of life emanated from inside.
The house, despite its wintery appeal, was in much need of repair.
The roof, currently hidden by snow, was deteriorating and needed to be retiled.
The painted trim was scratched and peeling.
The brick looked like it had earned every day it had been there.
The windows, as old as the 100 year old house, seemed to be offering easy passage to both sunlight and the wind.
In fact, there’d be mornings where there would be found a tiny thin snow drift on the inside of the windowsill like miniature landscape mimicking the outside world.
Yet despite all its flaws, if one were passing by and then stopped to stand outside in the cold December air and look inside… you would feel warm.
A warmth that only comes from life itself.
And, to be clear, not a romanticized version of life.
No, it is a warmth that only comes from life in its most honest portrayal.
Laughing, yes, but also shouting, crying, exasperation, worry, and fear, all in good measure along with optimism, hope, tenacity, bliss, and more.
On this particular Christmas Eve, the young couple put their infant son to bed and marvelled at their new found responsibility and blessing.
They then headed downstairs and retrieved a bag brimming with fifteen dollars worth of plastic dinosaurs from the dollar store and began to wrap them for their son to open with excitement on Christmas morning.
They placed the gifts under the tree and suddenly the warmth that seemed so evident to those looking in to the little house from the outside became unignorable to themselves.
They had imagined a Christmas morning with endless amounts of gifts for their boy containing the latest and best toys imaginable.
That thought had haunted them and it had tried so desperately to extinguish any joy they had leading up to Christmas.
Mortgage and bills, and the borrowing of money from family and friends to pay them, would, it seemed at first, douse any spark of Christmas happiness for their new little family.
But as they looked at the meagre few presents under their patchy tree - a brachiosaurus tail poking out here, a pterodactyl wing poking out there - it became clear that they had worried and fretted for nothing.
Though surely they wished they could give more, and the very best of more, Christmas was not that… Christmas was them.
On Christmas morning their young son squealed with excitement with each new dollar store dinosaur he freed from its wrapping.
Any passerby on that cold snowy day would have sworn they felt warmer just from viewing the scene inside.
Not opulent.
Not dazzling.
Not budgetless.
Of course, Christmas can be all of those things for some and someday but at its core Christmas sometimes only requires a bag of dollar store dinosaurs… and each other.
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I grew up in a household with six children and hardworking parents who had bought a house in Port Credit because they didn’t want their kids growing up in the slums of Toronto. There was very little money to be had. With one dollar in hand ,we each would go to the five and dime and buy a gift for each member of the family. These would be wrapped and piled under the tree and were always greeted with excitement . One year we pooled our money and bought my dad a monogrammed tie clip . It may have cost 50 cents. We could have D for daddy ( our name was Dadson so that might have worked) but we decided F for father was more sophisticated. My dad wore that tie clip for years. When people asked what the F was for he would proudly say Father. He was genuinely upset when he lost it. I was an adult by that time. Here I am getting teary eyed with the memory.
We did this one holiday season near Burnamthorpe and Tomken road in Mississauga. To put fake chocolate on it, the heating oil tank emptied around that time as we prepared to move to Winnipeg.
This experience, in grade 11, is BURNT into me (as is lying on the black vinyl couch listening to the live version of Rick Wakeman's Journey to the Centre of the Earth) (On vinyl, with the big book of photos in the sleeve)
Thank you, therapy and adult techniques. Thanks also to those who use words for good.
All the best you