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Love is a season.
And holidays mark the seasons, and years like signs in the road,
reflecting the bumps in our journey, but showing us a way back home.

Sixteen, in pajamas, watching the rain pelt down,
it was long past midnight, Christmas eve.
Twinkling lights on one house across the road, stared back at me.
It was if they were trying to fill our dark house with color.
The block was filled with a hundred lighted windows.
But the blackness of our own, somehow, seemed more appropriate.  

There was no Christmas tree in our house that year.
I suppose Dad felt it was too soon, or perhaps just the effort to get through each day
had taken all the strength he had.
We had stayed up and watched a Christmas program together.
Perry Como, I think it was, for I think I remember he sang "Ava Maria", and Dad got teary eyed.
My brother had come home from the Air Force earlier that week,
trying to help bring us a bit of cheer,....at least, for awhile,
but he had been called back to duty, and I missed him terribly.

The house was silent after Dad had gone to bed.
I wasn't sleepy,....and it was lonely looking out at the cold night
It seemed the whole world was sleeping, waiting for Christmas.
                                 
As I finally headed for bed, I noticed a light had been left on in the front coat closet.
I opened the door, and looking up, to pull the chain, I noticed the box.
The shoe box that had kept the sugar cube house, safe, dry, and out of harm's way.

A sugar cube house that Mom and I had made together when I was 8 years old. 
Little sugar cubes stacked into walls, and a roof, glued together with red frosting.
We had copied one out of her Good Housekeeping magazine that year,
and had surrounded it with little trees, and a oval mirror pond, and items we had found at the 5 and 10 cent store.  She had carefully packed it all away last year.
After her last Christmas.

Late into the night, I sat in the dimness of the house, laying out the sugary scene on the fireplace mantel....just as Mom would have done.

When the freckled morning moved into day...I woke on the sofa...Dad sitting next to me.  He had covered me with a warm blanket, and had fallen asleep beside me.

After breakfast....he disappeared outside, and soon came in carrying a sorry looking branch from our old evergreen tree. 

We decorated that bedraggled branch...it wasn't the most beautiful tree we had ever had, but it brought Christmas back to my family.
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For Deb's Contest: A Christmas Tale
(Inspired by "The Match Girl" By H.C. Anderson
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