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First things first, a little music to set the mood, Reader…
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Christmas Eve, 1983
Someone gently shakes my arm, rousing three-year-old me from sugarplum dreams. My mom, wide-eyed awake, crouches over the bed.
“Moo…wake up,” she whispers. “Can you hear the bells?”
I squint at the window, foggy with frost, and a twinkling jingle, so faint–am I dreaming still?–floats in from the snowy yard.
Santa?
“Come on, let’s go see.”
She helps me out of tangled covers, and Mouse, my aunt’s black-spotted cat, pads behind us down the darkened hall, the living room aglow under the watchful eye of the tinsel-y tree.
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Hiding behind the couch, my pajama footies are slick on the hardwood, and I lower to my shins, Mouse seizing his opportunity to crawl into my lap. He doesn’t know we must be very, very quiet. I try to shush his meows with especially good ear scratches.
A creak! The turn of the knob and my mom’s sudden inhale, and my heart is fluttering in my throat, fingers frozen in Mouse’s fur.
And then…there he is.
The man himself in his shiny black boots and floppy red hat, a brown sack of goodies slung over his back.
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Forgetting to breathe, too much excitement thrumming from head to toe–did I leave my body? How else could I see, all the way from here, peering around the armrest, that Strawberry Shortcake doll with such perfect clarity?
Her poofy pink hat and green stripey tights and her polka-dot cat, arranged on the makeshift mantle of my grandma’s piano by a white-gloved hand.
Oh, but there was more being pulled from the oversized sack!
The Purple Pieman himself, with a curlicued mustache and little Lime Chiffon with her perky, green parrot. And the pièce de résistance, the Berry Merry Worm with his oversized head and sunshine-yellow saddle.
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Santa, his work now complete, pocketed the carrot (were his reindeer on the roof? would they leave hoofprints in the snow??), polished off his cookie and milk…and disappeared with a wink.
It wouldn’t be right to touch the toys, not until Christmas morning had officially dawned, but my mom helped me clamber onto the piano bench to inspect the crumbs left on an empty plate, ironclad proof of what I already knew.
Santa had been here. His boots on this floor. His hand on every toy.
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I don’t remember crawling back into bed, my mind bubbling with details I would never forget as I stared at the ceiling, covers drawn to my chin.
And then, with a twinkling of bells, I heard it…
“Ho, ho, ho…merrrrrry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”
This, my most cherished childhood memory, taught me that magic is real.
(And no, this wasn’t diminished one bit when I learned, many years later, that my aunt had stepped into the Big Man’s shoes that night.)
It’s the feeling I cultivate when I want to cast a spell or honor the Moon with a ritual. And any time of year, snow or no, I can cue up Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” to ignite this magical mindset.
As a practitioner, being able to get yourself into a mystical state of mind is one of your most valuable skills.
“Ordinary” reality, with its seemingly endless stream of atrocities, forever just a tap and a scroll away, can leave us choosing numbing distractions over being present amidst the onslaught of things we feel (and in many cases are) powerless to change.
And to be sure, sometimes distractions are precisely what we need. Being 100% present 100% of the time sounds pretty damn exhausting TBH, but when we forget how to tune back in…that’s when we can feel lost and lonely, even surrounded by loved ones.
What’s your magical touchpoint, your surefire way of reconnecting to the Mystery?
It’s so important–maybe more than ever these days–to find what that is for you.
As absolutely shit as this world can be at times, it’s also heart-rendingly, gloriously beautiful, and we’ll all have greater access to our creativity and resourcefulness–two required ingredients for ensuring this planet doesn’t go up in flames–when we take time to remember this extraordinary beauty.
So, my magical friend, thank you so much for being part of my little pocket of the internet. I wish you and yours a season of wondrous joy and heartfelt connection.
Happy holidays 🤗
Melissa xx
P.S. If you’re not up on your 80s Shortcake swag, here’s the whole gang:
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