...the Peal of a Bell and that Christmas Tree Smell...

Merry Christmas, to you and yours, from me and mine.

If you don't observe the holiday, I will apologize for the salutation but most certainly not for the sentiment. As I've gotten older, I've discovered there are various customs and beliefs that can be expressed today and each one, as different as it seems, is in many respects one and the same.

In light of the weeks of frantic preparation and hectic intensity best marked by what seemed to be the simultaneous, spontaneous arrival of every person in the Western Hemisphere standing in line in front of us at the store, today now that it is here is a tonic.

Between you and me, I don't need snow, jingling belles or boughs of holly (or Buddy Holly, come to think of it), though they are all very nice and help make the season even more special. I get as contemplative as I am able to in the glow of the lights from the tree surrounded, as I hope you are, by your family.

I have no words to reflect my gratitude for the love of my life. She promised to love me in sickness and in health, and neither of us is certain, exactly, where Norwich, Connecticut, fits into all of that, but it proves life is indeed what happens when you're busy making other plans.

Today I’m grateful for the presents of the presence of our two children. I have forever memories of a German hospital delivery room and a newborn baby boy, listening intently as I sang "I've Been Working on the Railroad" in English at the very top of my lungs (is there any other way?) for hours, and of holding our infant daughter in the crook of my arm as she clicked her tongue just moments after being born.

He is 31-she is 26 and they are both used to their old man dissolving into a blubbering puddle of tears and smiles as I tell them in detail about their growing up, as if somehow they’d missed it.

The adults each have grown up to be are as wonderful and extraordinary as the children they were who blessed my life when I needed those blessings. Our family, like yours, brings various traditions and celebrations to the Christmas holiday with customs we inherited but have now made uniquely our own.

In Germany, the birthplace of my wife and our children, families open presents on Christmas Eve and that tradition crossed the ocean and remains with us to this day. Today, the First Christmas as the Germans call it, is for family and I hope you and yours are together if not in fact than in spirit, no matter the distance or time.

Tomorrow, or the Second Christmas, is a time for visiting with friends--the phone in our house will ring as my wife reconnects with those from her life across the ocean, wishing them well as I do you, for the coming year, knowing we have given one other the best gift we could ever have, ourselves.

Merry Christmas.
-bill kenny