The ghosts of Christmas past.

As a child, I greeted each Christmas season with held breath, waiting, not for the gifts, but for a feeling. I could almost always pinpoint the moment when the ineffable tide of Christmas washed over me.

The rituals we enacted were part of what made that feeling come.

Cookies in the apothecary jar.

Mildred’s pound cake.

The annual playing of  a scratchy LP, “Christmas in Sweden.”

No one but my father spoke any Swedish, and his grasp of the language was buried under the drift of years since Swedish was spoken at home.

It seemed that every song on the record contained these words, “Yoopa yoopa yoopa, yoopa yoopa yoopa!” Occasionally thrown in were words like,”Fura luska loota lisa!”

Each Swedish syllable contained an implied exclamation point. Although we had no clue what we were singing, we sang along joyously!!!

Winter in full.

Once upon a time in New Jersey I inhabited winter and it inhabited me. I knew of no place beyond its reach.

It rang beneath my shoes as I walked with my sister to the barren corner of Penn Lyle and Canoe Brook.

Standing at the bus stop, thighs pressed together, the wind funneled up our skirts. It chapped our legs from bare knees to panties.

The winter of my childhood swallowed the sun early and spat it out late. It clutched the day so close the sun could barely lift itself above the horizon.

It froze our eyelashes, our ears, our breath.

It wrote on our windows with frost.

It stole our mittens one at a time.