Any season can be a season of miracles. I think the real joy of Christmas may be a season that moves us to recognize miracles, large and small.  

My parents have been part of our Christmas since our son was a baby. Eighteen years. Since my dad's passing, the last four have been just my Mom. But with her increasing instability on her feet, and her increasing mental confusion, she recently moved to assisted living, and we painfully accepted that this Christmas she would not travel and spend weeks with us as she had in the past. I have enough trouble accomplishing all I attempt to accomplish in December without three days away. But if Mom couldn't come here, I was going there. Her losses had been many. I wasn't adding seeing her only daughter at Christmas to the list of no mores.

I would get most of my shopping done, and all my decorating, since I was hosting our writing group dinner before I left. This would leave wrapping, mailing packages and cards, and baking cookies for when I got back. NEVER DECORATE FOR CHRISTMAS ON A TIGHT DEADLINE. This ought to be one of the 10 commandments for Christmas. But what choice did I have.  And stringing the two holly bushes flanking the front door with green lights (instead of the white lights I use everywhere else outside) was the one decoration decision our son had decided on several years earlier.  This could not be cut out.  I was dead set on continuing that tradition for him to see when he arrived home from his first semester away at school. Of course, when I unpacked from last year, every string of green lights but one was dead. And the holly bushes truly seemed to have doubled in size over 2009. I needed a lot of lights. I sped off to the next town to the only pharmacy I'd found that always carried the green lights. Bingo! Five boxes left. I bought them. A miracle? Just lucky, I thought. But the next day when I went to decorate, I now couldn't get a one of my last years string of green lights to work. Grrrrr. I could feel my shoulder muscles tense, my scalp tighten, the frustration start to build. I was short one string of lights.  I didn't have time to go buy any anywhere, let alone start cruising eastern Massachusetts to find green lights. I began picking around in one of my other big packing boxes from the attic, pulling out the white St. Nick that went in the powder room and other various decorative items, dispelling some nervous energy while I avoided the upsetting fact that I wasn't going to get the lights done. And then, totally incongruous with the other items in the box, I uncover, flat against the very bottom, one new unopened box of lights. They are—you guessed it—green. Honest to God, as if in a Lifetime movie, they had miraculously appeared. Wonder of wonders.  All of a sudden, I am buoyant and untethered, and grinning.   

Decoration completed, writers' dinner a success, I could still not find my way clear to look forward to my trip. No matter how lovely the surroundings, and my mother's home, the Erickson community of Charlestown in Catonsville, Maryland, is truly lovely, the building where she now lives is still an assisted living facility. The memory of the hopelessness that suffused the residents' movements when I visited, the bleakness that permeated their stares was now evolving, in my imagination, into a reel from a sophisticatedly subtle horror movie. I was planning on spending the bare minimum of time in the common areas, and hoping that in the relative seclusion of my mother's room, I could manage her individual deterioration.

Arriving at the front door of her building via the community shuttle, I see through the windows red, green and white balloons floating up from green-and-red tablecloths in the dining room. Lights twinkle out front on this overcast Sunday afternoon, and two colorful blow-up toy soldiers greet me in the entryway. It's the holiday open house today, and festivities are in full swing. In addition to name tags, each resident also sports a cross-stitched holiday pin—a Santa, a Christmas tree, a bell. The staff is variably attired in Santa hats, some adding red scrubs to complete the outfit, angel costumes, and I even spy a full-out elf. The assistant facilities manager sports a big Santa tie with his dress shirt and khakis, and a big smile. As lunch finishes up, we're ushered out to the largest family room area where a big band orchestra a la Lawrence Welk is playing, and they are fantastic! Members of the staff spin, sing, and dance around the area to Christmas tunes interspersed with a salsa or a cha cha number, taking an occasional free-standing resident by the hand and swinging them oh-so-carefully around.  My Mom and I sit in a corner in front of one of the Christmas trees watching.  Are my Mom's eyes sparkling a bit?  Bernadette, a resident standing nearby hunched over her walker, begins to swing her hips to the beat. Frail, white-haired Mary, entering from the left, shuffling along between the silver metal legs of her walker, adjusts the rhythm of her steps to the tune, adding a little hesitation and a little higher arc to meet the beat. You have to look hard to see it, but it's there. I watch several steps and Mary is stepping in time.  She is.  I'm singing inside and out.  Jingle bells, jingle bells.  I could happily join the dance, too, except this is their party, their platform, their time of light. In the most unlikely and unexpected place, I have found Christmas for the first time this year. What a gift.

Three days later, I arrive in Logan airport after a flight delayed an hour to wait for some passengers off late connecting flights.  I'm tired but satisfied I've taken care of a lot of details for Mom in her new place, and given her some Christmas, too, with a tour to see a light show, some shopping, and lunch out with a stop for peanut butter bakery cookies that she loves so much we buy extras to take back. She has them now in a butter-spotted bakery bag on a napkin on her dresser. The checked baggage is taking an unusually long time to arrive and as I stand waiting, having already called my son and husband, I hear a bird's song. It's loud and clear, and coming from somewhere up above in the high-ceilinged hanger like baggage claim area in Building E. I look up and see a speaker. Which airport is is that has those tunnels where you hear nature sounds in concert with a light show? Has Logan added, in typical unostentatious Yankee fashion, a clear simple bird song to the background here? But the noise doesn't seem to be coming from the speaker. There is a tall, fit African-American man in a white button down shirt and khakis mopping the floor on an upper level. He moves in and out of a doorway, his head tilted forward to monitor his work. I stare hard but don't have a good angle on his face.  His mouth does not seem to be pursed in a whistle.  And he would have to be using one of those bird whistlers in his mouth to be able to make such a perfect bird call. Crazy. Who would bring that to work at the airport?  It can't be him. But where is this song coming from? I look around to see if anyone else is wondering at the source of this trilling music, but the people standing together are in conversation and don't seem to be noticing.  And lone travelers are either on the phone, standing with an aura of obvious impatience, or staring tiredly toward the carousel. Then I see one suited-man looking up to where the man is cleaning the floor, and then smiling grandly as he turns to say something to the man behind him. I stare again at this custodial man several yards above us. The sound does seem to be moving with him, and it has stopped on the two occasions someone has walked by up there and he has appeared to speak to them. He's worked his way to the other end of his hallway and is starting down the escalator. I walk over to lean against a corner of the wall near the bottom to solve this mystery once and for all. As he nears the bottom, swabbing away at the sides of the escalator as he descends, the mystery is solved. Or is it? This bird call is his. It's incredible. So real. So clear. So musical. So full a sound, of joy, of life. The journalist is me sees a clip on this man on the evening news. The sound he is making alone is incredible. The fact that he's making it while he mops a dirty airport at 10:00 PM at night is a miracle indeed.  Where does he find that joy? 

Whatever he has, I wish there was a way to give it to everybody for Christmas.

Maybe there is. Maybe he already did, even if just for a moment there in the gray, poorly-lit baggage claim area. And it was there for me in the found green lights, and Betty and Mary's dance, too.  Maybe we can all be a part of such a gift, by enjoying, and offering, pure, simply wondrous "miracles" of in-the-moment joy. A very, merry moment to all!