christmas footprints

wishing you calm and brightness

One Christmas eve we went to my mother’s friends house.

It was snowing. We walked as a family.

Well,

My mom and dad walked. My sister and I had it good. We were pulled along in sleds.

Snow was falling quietly.

Our travels left lines and footprints in the snow.

Everything was glowing orange from streetlights, then red and green from all of the houses lit up with hundreds of tiny bulbs.

We were the only people out. There was nothing else in the world but that moment of falling snow and squeaking boots.

We were traveling home late. It was past nine o’clock. By then I reckoned it was past midnight in England, Europe and much of Africa.

It always struck me funny: Had Santa been to Europe yet? Why didn’t the poor people there in Africa get presents? Or did they?Who was naughty? Who was nice?

When I was young, I really didn’t have a sense of ‘the rest of the world.’ I knew from my nanny that we were lucky - that we lived in ‘the best part of the best part of the world.’

Having seen images of starvi…