I have always loved Christmas. I hope a time never comes round when I don’t. No matter how difficult life has been at times, nothing ever took the joy away. I’m not a religious person. I don’t celebrate Christmas as a Christian. I celebrate the season as a human being. I don’t do Christmas shopping. I make gifts. And I don’t wrap them. I hand them to whomever I make them for. And I don’t limit making and gifting to December. It’s a year round thing. I guess Christmas just brings out some things in society that I love: gratitude and sharing and good intentions and well wishes.

I still haven’t figured out if people are actually kinder and more tolerant and empathetic around Christmas, or if I see more of it because I want to and seek it out. But I suppose it doesn’t really matter so long as I can find it.

This is one of my favorite Christmas songs. I have it on vinyl. Many years it has been the first Christmas song of the season that I play. Then I let the rest of that side of the album spin around and around, a little scratchy and oh so perfect as my little home is filled with the voices of Bing Crosby and The Pointer Sisters.

Enjoy.

“But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

-Dickens, A Christmas Carol