We didn�t get our Christmas lights up after all because it started to snow and snow and snow. This morning dawned sunny and sparkly. The snow I trudged through to get to the newspaper at the end of the driveway was a perfect fine powder, the kind of snow where if you pick it up and sift it through the fingers of your glove you can see each individual crystalline snowflake.

AJ was beyond excited. After breakfast he and his dad headed to the sledding hill while I headed to the forest preserve for the first ski of the year. Mine was the only car in the lot. The sky was still early-morning pink. I skied beneath icicle laden trees, past a bush covered in red berries and sheltering a single fluffed-up cardinal. It was a picture postcard morning. We all arrived home about the same time for hot chocolate and toe thawing.

After I returned and cleaned up, AJ and I headed to his school for their annual craft fair fundraiser, where we picked up a few small things for the holidays. We came home for lunch and then pulled on our warmest clothes and walked past the sledding hill, and down the road by the elementary school toward Main Street for our town�s annual Christmas parade. AJ and I sang �Jingle Bells� as we walked, and he enthusiastically joined in with the carolers in the parade. We stood and waved and sang and collected candy (some benevolent girl scout troop tossed us about 10 mini Toblerone bars � bonus!) until we were freezing and then walked back along the parade route. As we passed the last float in the parade, Santa�s sleigh, we heard a �Ho,ho, ho!� We looked up and Santa was waving just to AJ � �Merry Christmas, little boy!� Dumbstruck, AJ waved back.

We walked home to warm up and AJ took a quick nap while I indulged in some serious sloth and watched the beginning of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (strangely, my spellcheck recognizes Azkaban, yet not Toblerone, nor, for that matter, spellcheck), on HBO, which has mysteriously appeared on our TV this weekend. I managed to tear myself away to wake up AJ and take him downtown for the Christmas carnival, which last year was full of great rides. This year was much more subdued, in part because there were fewer rides, and in part because it was so bloody cold. We road a miniature train that drove serpentine down the center of main street. We went down an inflatable slide and threw a football through a hole in a plastic backdrop. We petted some sheet, gave the pony rides a pass, and tucked into a booth at our local Italian restaurant for steaming plates of pasta while we watched the trains and the people and the carolers in Dickensian costumes strolling down the snowy street. It was pretty much a perfect winter day.

Alas, this means a less than perfect winter evening in which I must contend with a mountain of laundry and a pile of unedited pages. But it was worth it.

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