Our Christmas Boy
As an only child,Christmas was a quiet affair when I was growing up. I vowed that some day I’d marry and have six children,and at Christmas my house would vibrate with energy and love.
I found the man who shared my dream, but we had not reckoned on the possibility of infertility. Undaunted, we applied for adoption and,within a year,he arrived.
We called him our Christmas Boy because he came to us during that season of joy, when heReplica Omega us again. In rapid succession, we added two biological children to the family — not as many as we had hoped for, but compared with my quiet childhood, three made an entirely satisfactory crowd.
As our Christmas Boy grew,he made it clear that only he had the expertise to select and decorate the Christmas tree each year. He rushed the season,starting his gift list before we’d even finished the Thanksgiving turkey. He pressed us into singing carols,our frog-like voices contrasting with his musical gift of perfect pitch. Each holiday he stirred us up, leading us through a round of merry chaos.
Our friends were right about adopted children not being the same. Through his own unique heredity, our Christmas Boy brought color into our lives with his irrepressible good cheer,his bossy wit. He made us look and behave better than we were.
Then,on his twenty-sixth Christmas,he left us as unexpectedly as he had come. He was killed in a car accident on an icy Denver street,on his way home to his young wife and infant daughter. But first he had stopped by the family home to decorate our tree,a ritual he had never abandoned.
Grief-stricken,his father and I sold our home,where memories clung to every room. We moved to California, leaving behind our friends and church.
In the seventeen years that followed his death,his widow remarried; his daughter graduated from high school. His father and I grew old enough to retire,and in December 1986, we decided to return to Denver.
We slid into the city on the tail of a blizzard, through streets ablaze with lights. Looking away from the glow, I fixed my gaze on the distant Rockies, where our adopted son had loved to go in search of the perfect tree. Now in the foothills there was his grave — a grave I could not bear to visit.
We settled into a small,boxy house,so different from the family home where we had orchestrated our lives. It was quiet, like the house of my Tag Heuer Replica Watches childhood. Our other son had married and begun his own Christmas traditions in another state. Our daughter,an artist, seemed fulfilled by her career.
While I stood staring toward the snowcapped mountains one day,I heard a car pull up,then the impatient peal of the doorbell. There stood our granddaughter, and in her gray-green eyes and impudent grin, I saw the reflection of our Christmas Boy.
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