Every year around this time I decide to write a Christmas story. By January I forget all about it. But this year I am determined.
It will start with a squirrel and end with a rooster.
It will start with a night and end with a dawn.
Saint Nicholas will make an appearance, as he must.
All of the animals will talk.
Snow and lights.
There may even be a love story.
And it will be a classic. Because no one writes a Christmas story without hoping that it will become a classic. It will be read to unruly grandchildren on winter nights when they wriggle in their beds for the knowledge that a stack of presents is waiting for them downstairs, if only they could go to sleep. It will smell of cinnamon and peppermint and spruce. It will be whispered in the half-darkness of shuttered windows and nightlights shaped like fairies or whales or moons. It will be murmured like a wintertime song, puzzled out and reasoned with. It will mean more than it looks like on the surface.
As the wise child said, "It will be true on the inside."
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