Caroline’s Christmas
Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
She is only half-a-body taller than the tree’s lowest branches and she looks up into its lights with real majesty, in a way not at all like she’s looked at anything before.
Caroline, our youngest daughter, is given to two kinds of moments – those of sweetness, but more often those of stubborness and misbehavior in which her spirit appears to be as an unbreakable as anyone’s could possibly be. She yields to few commands on the first request, seldom – if ever – on the second, but more commonly on the third or fourth. She is as precious as a porcelain doll and her skin the same color and maybe just as delicate if only she’d hold still long enough to touch.
So it was with my own wonderment that I found this little girl slowly spinning in the lowest boughs of the tree, singing to herself a song played by an ornament. The decoration is a music box, of sorts, bought before she was born, a little more than three years ago.
The front is made to appear as though it were a stage with the curtains parted. In the center is Daddy Warbucks holding up his once-orphaned-and-now-adopted daughter, Annie, as high as she can be held. Behind them is a Christmas tree with a few bulbs that light and flash when a button is pushed and the last few bars of Tomorrow are sung by the recording inside.
This is what Caroline was singing to while my wife and I were struggling to put coats on our children in the doorway one night before running an errand. For the first time in her life, Caroline was the first entirely dressed and ready and had a few moments to herself there amid the odd collection of Christmas balls and hanging regalia. She pushed the button and started her dance, quietly singing the lyrics to herself, and watching the tree with the enchantment that seems to spread to little children from late November to the end of glorious, snow-covered December.
I wondered at this sight what the mystery of Christmas was for her and other children like her. And, of course, I couldn’t quite place it. While I still consider myself a young man, I am far too old to solve that riddle – that feeling that only the young can truly sense. I thought about her and though Christmas is upon us all, aside from Christmas Day, no one but her parents and grandparents are going to be especially kind to her this year in any obvious way.
Certainly all the lights on the houses and the Christmas tunes playing on the kitchen radio create a brightness that is noticeable to her, but there has to be something more than that – something untraceable for a child of her difficulty to be tamed at once into such an adorable little girl. Her height and where she reaches in comparison to the tree is no better a measurement of her age than her sweetness is an unraveling of the mystery of Christmas magic.
