But I’m not in the country tonight. I’m in the city and have just come in from shoveling. With my neighbours long gone to bed – my partner, too – I was alone. Nice, being out in a fresh snow with no other people around. My shovel scraping the sidewalk was all I heard. That, and that which I never listen to – my breathing. Oh, and in remembering what my mother used to say, “I can’t hear myself think”,  I heard my thoughts.

I thought of Christmas and the easy, comforting welcome of my sister and her husband. The beautiful Christmas table, the five place settings, the abundant cheer and warmth, the choice to be with each other. The absence of others was marked and acknowledged as perhaps unavoidable, but those who were present embraced each others company with the tacit agreement that no trouble would come into the house. And if it did, it would be ignored.

We talked the night away, had liqueur in our coffees Christmas morning, thought we’d collapse of exhaustion in the afternoon. The food was better than should be allowed, and wine stained the tablecloth without the fussing attached to these glass-happy accidents. It was good, and then some.

I value those few days and I’m glad I’ll have their memory. We’ll have other Christmases, I know, but that one is gone and won’t be back.  I’ll miss it.  But then again, I’m grateful I didn’t miss it.

Certainly, the year my two-year old sister woke early and tore the wrapping from every gift stands out. My mother remembers it well, too – and all too well.  It was the Christmas of the blanket thank-you: we will always treasure whatever it is you gave us.

From various Christmases, there are others:

• My foodie/fashionista sister, her Easy Bake Oven and her plastic wigs – blond, red, and battleship grey.
• My brother, his Rubber Soul album and his please drop dead expression in every photo.
• My youngest sister, her pre-Christmas separate stash of wrapped presents and her post-Christmas neat arrangement of toys and games
• My grandparents, and my feverish anticipation of their arrival for dinner.
• My mother, her sweat-inducing labour in cooking dinner for at least eight people – sometimes more.
• The card table on which kids fought and ate.
• The rum-induced light in my father’s eye that only lasted so long.
• My brother outside the window with a freshly cut Christmas tree, and my mother – from the inside – directing him to turn it around slowly so that she could see it from every angle. Also, the look of complete boredom on my brother’s face.
• Days of the week underpants.
• The first doll I really loved: a boy doll dressed in short black pants and a red vest, but  - oddly – wearing little girly Mary-Janes with white ankle socks.
• First outfit I really loved: mini-skirt with matching Nehru collar jacket.
• Ribbon candy that was never eaten.
• Striped hard candy that was never eaten.
• Barley candy (whatever that was) on sticks, gold or red, shaped like camels and other unusual things – never eaten.

The list is long, too long to list. But I add this one more, the best and my favourite Christmas memory: lifting my three year old sister, Ellen, perching her on my nine year old hip and pointing out the window to what I now know was a bright planet, Venus or Jupiter. Then, I  believed that it was something else and whispered “Look, Ellen. It’s the Star in the East”.

The Wise Men were astrologers and astronomers, and certainly would have studied the skies for the sake of time, navigation and omens. The Star of Bethlehem was probably an astronomical event of planets and stars converging in such a way that they created a very bright object in the sky. The myth-making around the birth of Christ, which paradoxically began well after the death of Christ, transformed this star into a powerful symbol of awe and redemption. For some, it’s a wistful notion, and that notion a beacon on which hopes and wishes are pinned.

My sister turned 50 last month, and went to Paris to celebrate her birthday. She brought back ribbons, the like I have never before seen, deep reds and deeper greens. They were purchased specifically to decorate the Christmas table, to lay over a white linen cloth. She loves Christmas, does our Ellen. She makes Christmas beautiful and soulful, even for non-believers like me. Food, wine, lots of laughter and easy affection. Because we are only recently in close proximity to each other, this year I have the same same joyful anticipation that was reserved for my grandparent’s Christmas day arrival.

Ellen has no memory of being held up to see the star that shone so on that Christmas morning. But I do, and as I anticipate the next few days with her and her husband, I realize that the star on which I pin my secular Christmas dreams was not in the sky that morning, but sitting on my hip – one small finger in her mouth and a tiny arm draped around the back of my neck.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good star.

On things lost and returned I can spend hours of thought. There’s one great loss to which I return more than what is practical. That is the loss of my first musical instrument, a little Hohner harmonica – a Christmas gift when I was eight.

My brother describes his disbelief and subsequent delight at finding, when he was 12, a .22 calibre rifle under this Christmas tree.  My delight was as great. I remember longing for and anticipating a saxophone. Why a saxophone – I can’t say. Perhaps the Simpson’s catalogue featured one in its slim two-page music section, and I, with my early and enduring fascination with beautiful machinery, was smitten by the curves and valves. Maybe the magpie in me was mesmerized by the shine. Maybe I just knew, instinctively, that with it would eventually come a porkpie hat, and what eight-year-old girl did not dream of that?

What came was not the saxophone, but a small rectangular box that held a polished chrome Marine Band harmonica. My love was instant. I developed an immediate tunnel vision. All that surrounded me disappeared, all fell silent.  I saw only the little mouth organ. There was nothing in the world so complete, so lustrous, so right. And just like no one else got to play with my brother’s .22,  no one got to play with my harmonica. Both are dangerous in the wrong hands.

My brother took the bus to school, but I fell into an age group that required me to go to one room school, not served by a school bus, about a mile from home. Winter in rural Nova Scotia blew dress codes to threads – I wore snowsuits, sometimes over my flannel pajama bottoms, or leotards (tights, really, but we called them leotards). Sometimes flannel-lined jeans for which I still hold a dreamy fondness. If, for some reason, I was required to wear a skirt, the snow pants remained underneath the skirt all day. I, and all the girls, looked like hippos in a plaid, reversible tutus, snow boots for toe shoes. A snowsuit ensured a pocket in which I could tuck the harmonica.

On the way to and from school, I lagged behind other kids, gave them a long lead time before I headed out. I walked to school playing my harmonica. Played it, tucked it in my pocket to dance a little, play, dance, play, dance….I did this throughout the winter and spring.  It was pure and elevating joy. My teacher once waited with me so that she could walk with me as far as her house. She asked if she could try my harmonica. She put it to her lips and played a tender – soulful almost – rendition of “Little Brown Jug”. I was stunned by her sudden transformation into a deity.

One spring day, after a short spell of dancing myself home, I reached into my pocket for the harmonica to discover it wasn’t there. I retraced my steps. Many, many times on many different days. Never found it. Foolishly, I believe it’s intact in some preserving pocket of time, and that it shines still, waiting for a magpie’s eye.