Time to reflect is the best gift of all

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

They keep asking me what I want for Christmas.

"Do you want a book, Mom? Do you want a gift certificate to the movies? Gloves? A sweater? Give us a hint."

I keep telling them that what I want they can't buy. I want time. An extra day between Monday and Tuesday. Two extra days. Ten extra nights. A dozen hours added to today. Huge chunks of time between now and Christmas Day to slow down, enjoy, luxuriate, bask in the smells and sounds and feeling of this season.

I want time to sit in front of the Christmas tree and re-read "The Gift of the Magi," and "A Christmas Carol" and "A Christmas Memory."

I want time to listen to carols and sip eggnog. I want to visit my mother's friend, Teresa, who lives in Methuen, walk into a house I haven't seen in 30 years and sit and talk and reminisce and see her daughters, whom I used to play with when I was a child, and her daughters' children, and catch up on all the years, in the glow of her Christmas tree.

I want time to do more than just sign my name to Christmas cards. I want to write long letters and make phone calls to Janet in California and my Uncle Buddy, whom I haven't heard from in years, and Ron and Mary Ann in Alabama, and Chris and Biggy in Florida because it's this season that makes me yearn for old friends, for it's now when I miss them most of all.

Biggy's babies are children already, their picture was enclosed in a Christmas card, and there's another baby on the way. Their card with this news arrived a week ago, but I haven't phoned yet to say congratulations; I haven't even sent them a card.

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I want time to visit Mark and Jill. They used to help us decorate our tree. We used to stop by their house on Christmas Eve. What happened to the time we set aside for this? "We'll see you after Christmas," we say now, but don't because even after the Christmas there's still never enough time.

I want to see Carl Peterson and Ed Doherty and Father Finn and Mrs. Butler and Ann Galvin. I want to make a gingerbread house and gingerbread people and wrap presents, really wrap them with home-made bows and curled ribbons. I want to watch "Scrooge" and "It's A Wonderful Life" and "Frosty the Snowman," in their entirety, not just the few scenes I see every year.

Even if we could give you time, Mom, you wouldn't sit in front of the tree, my children tell me. You wouldn't read or watch TV or go visit someone you haven't seen in years.

You'd find something else you "had" to do.

Would I? Last year, on the night we decorated our tree, after everyone had gone to bed, I put Christmas songs on the stereo, got a pillow and blanket from upstairs and camped out on the small couch in front of the tree. I poured a glass of eggnog and read "The Gift of the Magi" and when I finished I read "The Night Before Christmas." Eventually I put away the books and lay down and just watched the tree. I dozed some, but not much. I didn't want to waste time on sleep when I had this night to absorb, and dozens of other nights to remember.

And so I remembered, and the nights coalesced. That night and the night my father drilled holes in a lopsided tree and glued branches in the holes; that night and the afternoon Rosemary and I sat for hours trying to take the wrinkles out of the tinsel; that night and the night Mark and Jill strung lights; that night and the night Ann Galvin played her guitar and sang a song she wrote to my children.

I found time that night. Just a few hours, but they sustained me all through Christmas and beyond because everything I'd been seeking was within them: my mother, my father, my grandmothers, Rose, her mother, Janet Butler, the child I was, my children young. It was the present I ached for: time to reflect and enjoy; and I found it in the quiet of a single night.