Every Christmas for the last few years I’ve contributed a story to Jon Solomon‘s 25-Hour Holiday Marathon on WPRB. This is this year’s. Thanks to Jon and WPRB for this; if you’d prefer to listen, you can do that as well.

What do I remember from my childhood? Well, to begin with, this: there was a book and in this book was a drawing and in that drawing was a window on Christmas night and in that window was a face. I remember asking my mother and my father about the face in the window and about traditions, and I remember asking them if this could be our tradition, if on Christmas night we could seek to be the faces in the window, and they said no; they said, we have our own traditions.

Our traditions weren’t like those of most other families, but I didn’t learn that until much later.

What I do remember of those old Christmas nights comes in a series of blurred images. My mother and my father would wake me long before dawn, or well into the night, and when I’d reach to the table on which my glasses rested, they would say no, this is not a night for glasses, and so I’d leave the glasses on the table and don something other than pyjamas and walk downstairs to join them, half-asleep and blurry-eyed, still in my first decade of life.

I’d ask them, where are we going? And they’d say, we’re going to the church. And then I’d ask them, is this for a midnight service? And they’d chuckle and say, no, it’s far later than that now.

What happened next was the same every year: my mother would secure entry into the church and my father would follow, with me trailing behind. They would tell me to wait in the back of the church; they said that there was something that needed doing. I can remember once my mother telling me that the task was maintenance and I can remember once my father telling me that the task was an offering. And some years I’d go to wait in the pew in the back of the church and sit; I’d stare at the woodwork, and at the pine branches draped all over the church, and I’d look at the way the occasional set of headlights on the road beyond looked as they came through the windows. I had no watch and so I had no sense of time, and I was young besides, and so I had even less of a sense of time on those Christmas nights. Sometimes my parents would come and sit with me in the back of the church and sometimes they wouldn’t. But the church seemed unchanged when we’d make our way out of it, locking the door behind us, and walked quietly back to the car. And then as we’d drive away, my mother and my father would tell me to look out the back window at the church, and I’d see it there: a bright white light streaming from the windows, and just as the light looked white and crisp my vision would snap to attention, and for a minute or so I’d see the church with the light streaming from its windows with clear vision; for a minute or so, and sometimes less.

In those days, I thought everyone’s Christmas was like this. A sea of churches, all lit up as far as the eye could see.

What happened to change that I don’t know. One year I went to bed at the usual time expecting to be woken up before dawn for the usual routine and instead I woke to morning light in the window and the Christmas lights downstairs. I walked down the stairs, and as I walked I wondered what it all meant, and I wondered if this meant that we might instead see the faces in the window, or if that Christmas night had something else delirious in store.