And to all a glittering night...

Nothing makes you feel more like a real grown-up, I'm told, than going to a parent-teacher conference. An earlier stop on that same path, for us, is staying up late on Christmas Eve to carefully nibble out plausibly Santa-sized bites out of gingerbread cookies and assembling/wrapping/displaying the Santa haul. These are certainly fortunate children, and we are lucky beyond measure too: warm house, healthy family, the luxury of things to give, and time to enjoy it together.

(And with those poignant words I have just earned myself a year of snark in 2012. I will be grim again before President's Day, count on it.)

Scott is putting together a train table in the dining room as I write this, and just announced triumphantly that he has completed all the instructions... on page one. He expressed his dismay that the inside of the instruction booklet was not instructions in Spanish but rather more instructions (or "destructions," as Audrey would say) in English. However, things are definitely looking up from the first few minutes of assembly when I heard him mutter "Attach to B? What B? There is no B!!" If this is what it takes for an MIT-trained engineer to assemble a toy, then I'm afraid there is no hope for the rest of us.

There are many things still left for Mrs. Claus (Mrs. Clause, more accurately?) to wrap and stuff into wads of tissue paper, but I wanted to write down tonight the very clear image of Audrey, turning up to search the sky for Santa and saying, "Shhhhhh! Listen for a ho-ho-ho...." The way her excitement brims right at the very surface of her seems especially dear to me these past few months because that quality is something she'll learn to mask from us much of the time.

Be that as it may, I hope to remember as long as I live the way her upturned face looked tonight: small and eager and full of genuine wonder. After this many weeks of waiting for Christmas she'd just about decided it would never come. When we tucked her into bed, she asked me to be sure that her sign for Santa, lettered carefully in pink glitter, was on the outside of the house, where he could see it.

"I want him to see my words in the glittering night," she said.

Audrey's sign sparkles at the back door, Calvin sleeps oblivious to it all, and we are hoping to head to bed before dawn. We wish you all a glittering good night.