Words, Words, Words, Words

It's been gloomy weather all week, I'm still stressed about everything I've been stressed about, and it is starting to get to me again.

I need stories.

Tell me one of your favorite seasonal memories - doesn't have to be Christmas, could be New Year's eve, or anything. Give me something sappy and sentimental, or funny, or bittersweet, even.

As for me, for some reason I woke up this morning thinking of a boy I knew called Andy Winston, who was killed in a car accident the summer before my junior year.

His parents were friends with my parents, and his little sister was friends with my little sister. Andy was a year older than me, and when we were young, we would play together. I was the only non-related female he wanted at his Bar-Mitzvah, and he was the first boy I thought I'd have a crush on. We grew apart as we got older, and our paths literally never crossed in high school, but he's someone who was a part of the pattern of my childhood, and I missed him terribly when he was gone.

Every Christmas his family would come to our house to help decorate our tree. They'd have dinner with us, and then we'd decorate the tree. After the tree was finished, we would run through the house turning off every single light so the only illummination was the tree, and then we'd lay down on the floor and watch the the colored lights reflecting patterns on the ceiling.

Whenever I think of him, it's always the Christmas memory of us lying under the tree, looking at the patterns of the lights through the branches, and it always makes me smile.

This is probably the last year I get to really play the Easter Bunny; Charlie's almost nine, and that's usually when the magic starts to fade. But not today. Today Charlie has been practically having kittens, he's so excited, mostly because he's sure the Easter Bunny is going to get him the "Speedy Eggbert" computer game.* Before he went to bed he said to me, "The Easter Bunny is magic and can hear what you say."

I thought of that as I was admiring my handiwork in filling the basket. I really enjoy setting it up 'just right', and as I looked at it, it felt, just for a moment, like magic, because when Charlie comes downstairs in the morning and sees it, to him it will have been left there by magic.

It is such a wonderous thing, when a child still believes in things that we cynical grown-ups don't. That there is justice in the world, that it's okay to have a 'do-over', that rabbits grant wishes. I'll miss that when it's gone.

But tonight I am the Easter Bunny, and the magic will continue for a little while longer.

*The Easter Bunny did. Carrying on a tradition started by my mother, my son will get, in addition to WAY too much chocolate, one small gift. This game is what he's been asking for.