A Fresh Perspective: A Christmas Letter

A Christmas Letter

Light of Hope Pours Through the Darkness & Gets Us By

by Brent Taylor

Most of us grew up with hopeful notions about Christmas. Santa coming down a chimney, gifts under a tree, tinsel, lights, and the anticipation of something extraordinary. Strangely enough, for me the extraordinary was a shaving kit in my stocking when I was four years old. I immediately went into the bathroom, stepped up on a footstool, foamed my cherubic face, and brushed away my innocence with that plastic razor. Shaving with a pretend shaving kit made me feel like a man at age four. Although in subsequent years, I regressed to the toys of boyhood — footballs, baseball gloves, and wood-burning sets. All of this was delivered by Santa Claus. Here is the odd thing though. Santa may not look like a man in an ill-fitting red velour suit to everyone. For me and my two sisters and two brothers, Santa seemed more feminine.

Our Santa was a note-writing town-crier of yuletide news. Each Christmas Eve, the five Taylor kids left milk and cookies on the hearth for Santa. This was the first thing we checked on Christmas morning. On the hearth we found the cookies broken, although mostly uneaten. And the milk sipped rather than gulped. We never saw Santa, but with each passing Christmas, the mystery grew, and the winds of time eventually brushed aside the vale to reveal what we suspected all along. Santa was our mother. She wrote the notes left behind on the hearth with her right hand to disguise her identity; she normally wrote with her left. But the note Santa left was the thing we looked for most eagerly each Christmas. This direct communication from Santa gave us the sense that someone was paying attention.

There were other notable Christmas gifts as I grew older. A Schwinn Sting-Ray bike with a banana seat, electric cars and racetracks, silly putty, and the amazing Slinky.

None of those things lasted very long. But the memories of Christmas remain alive with those letters from Santa.

My children are grown and Christmas is different now. In the amber light of a fading year that many wish they could forget, I walked into the back yard and watched the moon announce itself through leafless trees like a “follow the bouncing ball” cartoon song. Boo the cat was looking for mice near the fence as deer rustled the leaves on the edge of our woods. On that winter evening I thought of the words of the English writer Adrian:

Bell, describing a Norman church whose windows ‘are no more than dream holes, the walls so thick that the light has the effect of being poured in through a funnel’.

That is how I think of Christmas and letters from Santa and gifts under a tree. They are light being poured into us through walls so thick that we seem to be living in a cave. And yet the light pours through and overcomes the drought and hunger, the famine and pandemic, and hope is what gets us through. “Like a bright savior in a richly gloomy cave,” as Ronald Blythe phrased it.

Another year has come and gone, and the glass of milk sits on the hearth, a plate of cookies next to it. What will I find in my stocking? My family loves me and I have friends, a cat, woods, and the moon — the familiar landscape of this city I’ve known since boyhood — and I find that if I am not covetous of those with full stockings, it is because I have all I need. The days are here and ready. Ready for a stiff drink of milk and a crisp cookie, a fresh sheet of paper, and my favorite pen. My wife is watching a Hallmark movie, which gives me reason to believe that the only way those movies survive is hope. Hope that the acting will improve and the story will be nuanced and the script free of cliches. I ask my daughter, “Why?” and she tells me that she watches Hallmark movies if they are close to Christmas, and only if she is bored. I watch them to feel intelligent because I can always predict what will happen and how it will end. For me, in the end, there are letters at Christmas with milk and cookies, faith, hope, and love — and the greatest of these is love.