When I was a kid, right after Thanksgiving the evening paper used to post a little box with a Santa and reindeer in the corner of the top of the front page:  "Twenty-five more shopping days 'til Christmas."  The countdown was the first thing I looked at when the paper arrived on the doorstep. 

There was something beautiful and exciting, and yes, even glamorous about Santa and his sleigh and his reindeer.  It was a brightness, a fullness, a rosiness, a cheerfulness.  It meant people would put Christmas lights and electric candles in their front windows, leaving its glow on the snow covering the ground and shrubbery. It meant there would be a tree put up in the living room (my mother would never allows ours to go up until Christmas Eve), strung with colored lights, and shiny glistening Christmas balls.  By the time I was six or eight I was getting to decorate the tree.  This was, without question, the most exciting time of the year for the boy.

It wasn't just the prospect of Christmas gifts, or Christmas parties (rare when I was a kid, very rare), or the Christmas candies and Christmas dinners.  It certainly wasn't about Christ and Mary in the Manger even though there was a lifesize one always constructed in the town square (the most elaborate Christmas decoration of all in this child's mind).  It was about maybe-a-break, maybe-something-better.  Maybe another way of living the life.

I grew up in one of those households dominated by a marriage that was not only rocky but full of turmoil.  I thought I knew what the problem was, of course,  but children never know.  They only know it's there.  Because they can feel it in their bones.

However, I was blessed with an eldest sister, almost old enough to have been my mother.  She married and began a family when I was still a small boy.  She shared the same excitement about the coming holiday and she inculcated it in her children.  The arrival at the house on Christmas morning of her young family was the single most important moment after the decorating of the tree.  She was, in effect, the spirit of the day, as her enthusiasm buoyed the hope. 

So once that Santa appeared in the upper right hand corner of the evening paper, and once the countdown began, so then did the hope spring into full gear.  The kid couldn't wait.  That in itself was joy personified.  By the time the calendar was down to the single digit, I was going to bed with visions of candy canes in my head.  Donner, Blixen, Rudolph and Mommy Kissin' Santa Claus.  Joy to the world.  Hope.

Somehow on Christmas Day, whatwith sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles of the family together, and a turkey roasting in the oven, and the women and children finding a surprise or a laugh from something wrapped in colored paper and ersatz silk ribbons, and a glass of Coca-Cola (which was only allowed on holidays); somehow the world, my world,  quieted down for a moment.  Outside, the frosted windows in New England, if we were lucky, it was a snow-covered land and rooftops; and if we weren't, the landscape was brown and grey and frosty, and even grim.  But inside, with that tree and the twinkling lights and the candy canes hooked to the evergreen branches and pretty packages tied up in ribbons, with the laughter provoked by the exchanging of gifts, and the excitement and awe in the children's voices, there was peace.  Everything was all right. 

JH and I went to a holiday party (they used to be called Christmas parties) on the Upper East Side.  Right across from Elaine's.  The City's avenues are always bright in the nighttime, but now of course, they are brighter.  The awnings and canopies of restaurants, newspaper shops, dry cleaners and nail parlors are strung with the lights.  Elaine's windows are dripping in strings of rather chic white lights.  To this adult's eye, all these lights have a less enchanting power than they did for the young boy.  So when I look at them, in pursuit of comfort, and solace from the grim, the hard and the difficult that is September 11; when I look at them, I see them through the boy's eyes. 

It's an exercise, of course, looking at something through your child-self's eyes.  You have to concentrate and focus on the brightness and all that it promises, ignoring the harsh, the meek and the kitschy-tawdry surrounding.  And when you do, you are back on the kid's track.  Fourteen more days till Christmas.  Promises of peace.