I half-open my eyes in the morning, and through my eyelashes, I see the dim light of a beautiful morning trying to break the opacity of the curtains. I get up and open the windows: the light gets in, in white flashes embroidered with gold. There's a feeling in the depths of my soul, a happy feeling: Christmas is coming.
Glimpses of long past Christmas mornings come flying with the wind: I hear my mother's voice from the kitchen, while she prepares our supper. I hear my sister's laughs while they set up our Christmas tree in a corner of our small living room. I hear the dogs barking friendly when my father gets home from work.
I'm a small child, a little dark-haired girl in a short home dress. I run to the kitchen and try to get some of the cake batter that my mother is making. She gives me a little in a spoon, and I run to the yard, trying to escape the dogs that try to take the spoon from my hand. We run, play and laugh. It starts raining heavily, and I hear mom telling me to go in, so I sit at the kitchen door steps and look at the rain falling, breathing in its fresh smells.
My mother and father are gone. We have all grown up, and grown apart from each other for many reasons - I don't know if any of these reasons are strong enough, but life has its own ways of teaching what it wants us to learn, and sometimes, we learn best when we are alone and look at things from a different perspective.
My childhood is gone, and so is that Christmas tree, but the child that used to dream of the gifts she would get while she watched Christmas TV commercials and memorized jingles and Christmas carols, is still alive. I left her sitting at the kitchen door, holding a spoon full of cake batter. Sometimes, she looks at me.
