Dear Santa Claus:
Please accept this letter as my formal Christmas wish list.
Since I am a writer by trade I thought putting my request in print would help expedite my appeal for merriment. I will do my very best to be brief here, because I know you are busy hanging out at malls and Skyping with your elves back home.
In a word sir, what I’d like most for Christmas this year is time. Can you please make me some?
There are a few ways you can wrap up time, so forgive me for being so bold as to suggest ideas, but sometimes my Type-A personality and obsessive-compulsive need for some order are best fulfilled if I just do what needs doing myself. I suspect you’ll understand.
Time can be wrapped up in the moment when I can officially unplug from the demands of the outside world, and tune in to the holiday in motion.
You see, I know how precious time is to others too, so I look forward to the moments when I can connect with my friends and family; a mutual gift exchange, if you will.
Forgive me if this sounds selfish, but I would like some me-time to come in the form of a hot bath and the solitude to enjoy the steaming water with absolutely no interruptions.
Perhaps we could measure this time as being the amount required to read at least three chapters of a book that has nothing to do with my career, raising children or solving the world’s issues, or my own.
I’d like to enjoy the words as I savour a glass of full-bodied red wine, almost warm in temperature, and one significantly good piece of dark chocolate. Let me be in there just long enough to make the Carpenter wish he’d finished the bathroom with a bathtub big enough for two.
Time will be in the embraces shared with good friends who have become like family. The virtual hugs via phone calls to far away places to send good wishes.
And yes, forgive me, but the text messages that make my friends feel as much a part of my holiday scene as if they were here with me. I make no apologies for using technology to make it so, because instant virtual communication is a time saver.
If Jack Frost would drop the temperature below freezing, time could also be had laughing with my kids and the Carpenter on our ice rink, which is currently more like a boarded pond.
I want to hear the scraping of skates and do circles on the ice with the three people I adore the most. Just us. Together.
Time will be the moments shared with my mom and my auntie Dee Dee in the kitchen on Christmas Day, doing the delicate dance of manoeuvring hot plates and steaming dishes as we work together to make the holiday meal, which will be fabulous, naturally.
Time will be the song played when the rest of the house is quiet on Christmas night, and the Carpenter and I share a dance in the glow of the tree lights. We’ll relive a moment we’ve shared for more than 20 years of Christmases; a life, but not yet a lifetime. Let there be time for that.
Keep the gifts, Santa.
Let me make memories instead.