Lessons From the Kissing Booth

Merry Christmas to all of you, in whatever version you choose to celebrate it.

I've been thinking about this for days now, and have not managed to come up with one legitimate Christmas memory from before the boys were born. There were ten of them, so you'd think I could come up with something, but...no. I don't remember staying up late to wait for Santa or waking up obscenely early or any of those memories that other people have. And yet I'm sure that those things happened.
There are things that I feel I ought to remember, years of wanting something badly and not getting it, or the other way around. I don't remember wishing for things. I know that I must have received my first keytar, a red Panasonic one, for Christmas, and you'd think that one would have stuck. There's just nothing.

And so tomorrow I intend to sleep in, waking only to field calls from my family who will all forget about the time difference. I'll get up in the afternoon to put the new duvet cover on my bed, and then I'll go to the movies with a friend. Later, I'll come home and drink port out of my lovely new port glasses. It'll be low-key and, likely, lovely.

The doctor told me the other day that I would probably recover better from these colds if I did less walking around in the winter rain. But my late nights have been interrupted lately by clogged sinuses and hacking coughs, and so I bundle myself up and step lightly through my neighborhood. It looks different in the smaller hours, but still like home.