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It has been a strange Christmas week, not my usual with baking and flipping through my grand-mother’s recipe box, when I wonder, yet again, how may jam cake recipes might one woman need. 

So many, apparently. 

I have passed along the egg nog and ice box cookie recipes to my sister-in-law.  I may commandeer a kitchen this weekend to make candy, but then, again, I might not.  Everything is upside down this Christmas.  Not in a bad way, just in the most normal of ways when children grow up, have children of their own, when there are new wives and husbands and significant others to accommodate and welcome into the family. 

Maybe that is why, when a beautiful stray turned up at my house, my entire family converged to see the visitor, to take care of her, to make calls and plans for who might give her a home if the owner can’t be found. They are all animal lovers, but they seemed especially fierce about it. She stayed an afternoon, limping a little and content to sit on the porch and look through the door at us between napping.

A few hours later and she was gone, but I kept water out for her, and food.  My neighbor, Darlene, gave her chicken and said had seen her on her deck a few days earlier.  We wanted her to come back, although we didn’t say this.  She was thin and needed brushing.  Was aromatic, and not in a good way, and we agreed she had the whiff of neglect about her. 

I drove around over the weekend looking for her, although I would have told you I was just out for a joy ride, but I had old towels in the back of the car in case I came across her.  She had been spotted, Legion Park.  Breckinridge. But I never saw her again. 

My friend, Pat, said if she shows up for a second time, then she is mine.  She has chosen. 

I liked the idea of that.  That with persistence comes connection.  Or commitment. Or perhaps something more nebulous, but important, big.  And we don’t have much choice about it. 

Like families.  

My mother gave us the lesson of acceptance, and I don’t think she ever shamed my siblings into coming home for Christmas, attending every Thanksgiving or birthday.  She understood that families have a strong but flexible band around them.  She wasn’t going to be the nag.  It helped we all lived close by and she saw us often, but even so, she didn’t meddle into the particulars.  She worked around them. 

This year the twins and Cy will have Christmas a day early, because their dad works on Christmas Day.  Since the babies don’t own calendars, they won’t know the difference.  As yet, no plans have been made for Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, but I imagine we will end up together, somewhere, for a few hours and some cups of Christmas cheer. 

My most memorable Christmases have been impromptu and magical.  A Christmas Eve answering  the phones on the HELP line in Bowling Green,  Most of the calls were from regular clients, our phone number and our voices their tenuous connection to the world.  They called to wish whoever was working a Merry Christmas, and there were all in a big way, spreading season’s greetings.  Another Christmas Eve I sat in Colby’s with my friends, Jim and Fernando, watching the afternoon fade as big snow flakes fell. 

They ran us out eventually, but it was the calmest, sweetest time I can remember. 

So, I will keep food and water out for my girl should she decide to spend the holidays with me.  I’ll wander over to see what Santa Claus brought the babies.  I’ll stand at the expanse of the new windows in my house and wish, and wish for snow. 

Here, gone, to come again, Christmas, the day, is over. We watched the sleepy two-year old work to process the toys under the tree, toys that weren’t there when he went to sleep the night before.  Next year he might have a thread of memory that teases him when the talk turns to Santa Claus. By four, he will have some sense of anticipation.  At five, he will be sick with excitement.  We can’t decide if that is a good or bad thing to do that to kids. 

I fall firmly on the side of enchantment.  Little ones live in a magical world as it is.  The way they hide behind curtains, peeking out to see if you can see them. You can look them right in the eye and ask, “Where is Cy?” And he collapses in giggles because, of course, he is right there, and you don’t even know it.

The magic fades with time, and they begin to understand such things as accommodation and conservation, the manifestation of which means it dawns on them they can’t fit into a drawer when playing hide and seek. While they never try to actually hide in the desk, when you pull open a small drawer and ask if they are in there, they solemnly shake their heads, knowing they aren’t there, but might have been. 

There comes a time when they will say, out loud, even though it spoils the game, “I can’t fit in a drawer,” and the game, and the child, are changed forever. 

New kinds of magic emerge. Passing an exam you thought surely you failed. 

Windfalls as small as a dollar bill on the ground, an unexpected gift, dodging metaphorical bullets when the car makes a gruesome noise and it turns out to be a small fix, the disaster of disease that goes into remission, or goes away entirely.  Logical explanations for all of this, of course, but also, small magic, an enchantment, just around the edges. 

It is a secret of mine, the way I prefer enchantment to a cold hard fact. My nature is to understand the world, not control it, so I spend a great deal of time reading and wondering and wooling things over.  I arrive at working theories, but flexible ones, always open to new information.  But first, always first, I think it is magic at play, or at the very least, serendipity. 

I gave up resolutions years ago because I talked too much about them and somehow all that strutting took the wind out their sails.  This year, as odd as the past few months have been, with family additions and home additions and everyone run down and tired and worried for the world and the grocery bill, I cast about for some magic, some enchantment to pull me into the New Year. 

Because I have decided to embrace enchantment.  Just now, as I write these words, I realize how it has gone missing.  Enchantment is defined as a great feeling of pleasure and delight. Surely this isn’t too hard to find, even in the everyday.  I was enchanted Christmas Eve, out for last minute shopping. Rushing around and pushing my cart, I caught a snippet of conversation between a father and his children. 

As they passed around a bottle–perfume, bath oil, I don’t know–the dad said, “Your mom likes to smell this”  and I was enchanted.  All of them out to find something to please her, the intimate way he knew her, her desires, even in the simplest thing, a lemon balm bath oil, or was it lavender, no matter.  He knew.  The children agreed. 

I kept that image for the rest of the day. 

And it gave me pleasure. 

So.  No resolutions, then, but a different sort of paying attention. An opening up, even on hard days, gray days, the simple joy of finding a certain kind of magic.