The Consistency of Sixty-One Christmases

A shiny sun

This is my sixty-first Christmas season, and a rather nice one. I’ve been mindful and even frugal for the past several holidays, but this year I had an inexplicably overwhelming urge to do a little more. A lot of it is because my granddaughter Ellie is twenty-two months old and clearly comprehends that something nifty is going on. She’s a third-generation only child, so there’s none of that houseful of screaming kids hilarity that I recall from holiday visits to my mother’s sister...