Chapter One: HomeComing Christmas

Christmas eve, 1954, and we gather at our family home on the lake anticipating the laughter of a fat man with a beard and the scratch of tiny hooves on the roof.

All lay in darkness as I walk down to the lake alongside my uncle, who always smells of Old Spice, cigarettes, and peppermint. He is a jolly man with gentle eyes, wise with age and faded with time, who usually communicates through a series of grunts, snorts, and laughter, sounds, my Dad says, akin to our prehistoric ancestors.

The lake is flat and black, moonlight annealed to its surface like tin foil, and the chill night air freezes the hairs in my nose and brings tears to my eyes.

Behind us light filters through the house windows and shadows dance along the walls as aunts and uncles, some by blood, others by lifelong acquaintance, gather around the fireplace. A piano plays, accompanied now by a fiddle, and then the soft melody of a Christmas carol, familial voices blended as if by a master vintner.

I shake with a chill and my uncle pulls me to him, wraps his arms around my shoulders. “Tell me what you see, boyo?”

I look up and his eyes are shut. “What do you mean?”

“Close your eyes and tell me what you see.”

I squeeze my lids together. “I can’t see anything?”

“No?” he whispers. “Listen then and tell me what you hear.”

“I hear the waves,” I tell him. “Lapping at the shore, and the family singing up in the house.”

“Turn those sounds into a memory and you’ll always remember this night.” He points out to the lake, to a wall of vapor rolling in from the opposite shore. “There are ghosts out there, boyo, dancing in the mist. Can you see them? Specters of those who’ve come before us; our kin. Got to come back and visit once in a while. It’s the way things work. Promise to always come back for a visit. They’ll be here waiting for you.”

I peer into the darkness, watch the mist skip across the surface of the lake. It swirls and forms into tendrils as if directed by some otherworldly force. My uncle watches and says, “Don’t be afraid, memories are buried treasure, possessed of a power all their own. They’ll hammer at you if you let them, but you’ll find yourself half a man without them.”

A series of distant mortar thumps and the sky explodes; class-A fireworks, a tradition with lake folk, complete with reports, flashes and shimmers of every size, shape and imaginable color.

It is getting colder and the snow crunches under boot as we turn and start back toward the house, toward the comforting murmur of family and friends.

Warmed by a candle of wonder, carefully tended by the child inside my uncle, I go to bed and lay in darkness. Just before I slip into the long blank of sleep I think, was it a dream?

Years later, I will return to the lake, to the shore, and wonder? Was I crazy? How about my uncle? No, I will have learned by then that crazy is simply a moniker we put on someone who still has the magic in them after they’re no longer a child.