It’s Christmas Eve’ and I sat down in search this morning of an expression of the brief glorious feeling I always have this season contrasted with the rapidity with which it passes.

Our family at different points will all be here this year, the first time in our twenty-seven years of having children that we all haven’t been here at the same time. While perhaps I have some melancholy with that fact, I am wholly full of the spirit of the season and the hope I always feel that the love I feel now will carry throughout the next year.

It is hard to write about the holidays, I feel, as I am quite aware that this is not the most amazing time for many of us. We feel especially the loss of those we love or perhaps just a life we remember from past seasons, the hope and joy we see in others making many of us feel an acute sense of loss.

I hope that my poem captures the sense of hope and love that has at some point held all of us. I know that it is full of rather cliché images of the season, but it’s also how I think about this time of year, and at some point such sentiment is permitted.

The picture here is a dog-sledding trip I took to norther Minnesota several years ago. I cannot quite get the brightness right while maintaining the clear presence of the footprints of dogs and humans walking together. It feels a little like we were walking on the moon as well with that dark sky visible in the upper left corner.

Happy holidays.