Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Yuletide is here again. Well, technically it has just passed, as the days are once again growing longer.

The festive season is festooned with distractions. Work parties, family gatherings, buying gifts. Wrapping gifts, which, when it comes down to it, do I actually enjoy? I enjoy finishing the wrapping. I delay starting the wrapping. It’s the 24^th, and no wrapping has begun as I type. No surprise as I am a procrastinator to my bones. Typing this is a way to delay both exercising, and wrapping. It’s a twofer.

However, once the wrapping is done, I LOVE the look of a tree with prezzies gathered around the base. The tree achieves its true form when be-presented. That is a real word. Until the presents are there, the tree is a Christmas tree in potential only, a decoration, a shiny thing that hopefully does lack a squirrel. Or climbing cats/bulldozing dogs. If you have a climbing dog, you have my sympathies.

But once the presents are there, well then it is a Christmas tree, its purpose fulfilled: to be a magnet for hopes and dreams and children driven wild by consumerism.

No, I’m not going in that direction. Too easy. But I just kind of did. Hey ho. Or ho ho as the case may be.

Clearly making this up as I go along. Don’t come here for edited and polished perfection, folks.

Yes, a tree with presents beneath it is the promise of (secular) Christmas made real, a place to gather, to be glad, to be generous, to give freely, and receive graciously. I’ve not always been great at the latter there, for which I apologize to all previous gift givers whom I have disappointed in my obvious disappointment. I had a tendency to dream too big when it came to my presents, which was wildly hypocritical when I was a kid and gave my brother a rubber frog that cost six pence. My brother still does not let me forget it. I was, I remind him, six years old. And saving money for candy.

I try to do better in my gifting now, and better in the receiving. It is a blessing to receive a token of someone’s regard, and it should never be taken for granted. Socks and underpants for the win, baby!

And the tree, in my house, does not spend long in its final form before the presents are opened, wrapping paper strewn across the floor for the cat to pounce upon then lie over, claiming his new territory.

Afterwards the tree does not revert to decoration status, no, it becomes a promise of next year, the next time, the next celebration, the next reason to come together. It is more powerful after Christmas than it was before, because of what it has been, and the ritual enacted around it, the promises it held at its base, now revealed, and shared.

And that, my friends, is a beautiful thing.

I will now torture this column into a parallel with writing. Wrapping paper and writing, yes, that should work…