“But that was not the same snow,” I say.

Ours will not be a white Christmas. In a way, that’s a relief. Two Christmases ago, it snowed for a week and the power was out for a couple of days. Not on the Day itself, a blessing, so the dinner was cooked and enjoyed, and we had light, and heat. But after. Angie and Karna were here and we all found chairs near the woodstove to claim for the day. Days. This year, it’s green. There was a hard frost overnight and the birds are crowding around the feeder. Some things don’t change.

But other things do change. I’m thinking of the old Christmases, the ones when our children were small and the house filled with such anticipation. I baked tray after tray of gingerbread, soaked dried fruit in brandy for cake, stuffed every nook and cranny with tins of shortbread, butter tarts, the panforte you can’t see under the wrapping in the basket in the photo at the beginning of this post but I assure you it was there, dark with cocoa, bitter with peel. So many of the friends I prepared these treats for are now dead. So I’ve scaled back a little. I did make shortbread and one tray of gingerbread. No panforte. No cake. Our children don’t love these last two so I make them buttercrunch instead, tucked into the boxes I mail them in early December, with a note saying, No need to wait until the 25th for buttercrunch. Though this year, one box has gone a merry dance from here to Victoria, somewhere else, and now it’s languishing in Ottawa with no plans to cross the river to Gatineau until January 5th. Oh, Merry Christmas. Trying to talk to Canada Post is like talking to wood.

But back to the old Christmases. I remember one very early one when we just had two children, aged about 3 and 1. In their stockings, new mittens and a small soap shaped like a duck. They were so delighted with these little things that we could have stopped right there, made the turkey and John’s trifle, and happiness would have carried us through the day. And to be fair, they were always delighted at Christmas. They never wanted electronics or money or cars, or maybe they did, but they kept the fiction intact for their mother. I’ve just listened to Dylan Thomas read his marvellous “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”, always a touchstone for me this time of year, and there are things I recognize and understand a little differently as I grow older. The burnished memories, the note-perfect details — surely there were things left out? Someone vomiting, maybe even Auntie Hannah, after the port, the rum in her tea, and finally the parsnip wine. Someone shouting or accusing another of cheating at cards?

Looking back, he saw the goodness, the magic. As I see it, after 41 Christmases here. The first one, we’d just moved in to an unfinished house, we had a little boy not yet 2 and I was pregnant with another, who would be born in January. We had no kitchen cupboards or counters, just a piece of plywood over some sawhorses with a sink rigged into one opening. We did have a fridge, and a stove. Because my parents and my brother were coming for Christmas, we hastily hung doors in the openings of the rooms where we’d made makeshift beds for them. We decorated a tree, a beautiful tree, and we spread our lovely carpet over the plywood boards. We pushed two little tables together for dinner on Christmas Day and I can’t remember a better feast. No snow that year but in subsequent years we had plenty. A couple of years later, when Angelica was 3 months old and slept through the festivities in a borrowed oak cradle under the big window by the tree. The year my father’s truck slipped over a bank as he tried to back up, realizing he couldn’t make it up the driveway after all and he spent the next week walking down in the snow, children accompanying him, to stand glumly looking at it, wondering how he’d get it back onto the driveway. (Spoiler: it wasn’t difficult, once the snow had melted.) There was the year I stood looking out a window at the top of our stairs to see Cristen, alone in the night, riding a toboggan down the driveway over and over again, our golden retriever Tiger racing alongside for each wild run.

“But that was not the same snow,” I say. “Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards.”

So this year: no snow, a waxing gibbous moon, seen last night with Jupiter, apparently their final encounter of the year, and one pan of buttercrunch remaining to be made and glazed with dark Belgian chocolate. With any luck, the tin in the box waiting in Ottawa will be fresh enough to eat when it’s delivered on January 5th. I don’t miss the snow. I miss the children, who’ve grown up, and I miss my parents, who are long gone to spirit, and I miss the friends who’ve either died or ghosted themselves into other lives. But when I walk up the stairs on Christmas Eve, when I look out the window into a darkness unpunctuated by any light but our own, the memory of them will be the company I imagine as I wait for the morning.

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steadily falling night.

Note: the quoted passages are from “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”. Imagine Dylan Thomas reading them. My very best Christmas wishes to all of you.