Memories of Holidays Past

 My favorite holiday has never been about the day itself. It has always been about a moment inside the day. A moment that slowed time enough for something deeper to settle.

I must have been eight or nine. Christmas. My mother at the table. Spread out in front of us were several unassembled "Weihnachtspyramiden", German Christmas candle powered merry go rounds. They were not toys. They were intricate, deliberate constructions. Small engineering projects disguised as decoration. Precision cut wood. Tiny figures in Bavarian dress. Puzzles that demanded patience.

My job was not glamorous. Glue. But my mother treated it like craft. She showed me how to apply it properly. Not too much so it would run. Not too little so the joint would fail. Enough to bond. Enough to last. There was care in that lesson. Care I did not yet know how to name.

When they were assembled, they were beautiful. But when evening came and the candles were lit, that is when the magic arrived. We shut the lights off. The heat from the flames turned the carousel slowly. Shadows sprang to life on the walls. Little Bavarian Christmas revellers danced in silhouette, looping endlessly, as if time itself had agreed to pause and watch.

I sat on the floor and watched. For minutes at a time. Completely still. Transfixed.

I have often wondered what it was about those small spinning worlds that held me so completely. Maybe it was the quiet certainty that something made carefully would behave as intended. Maybe it was the glow. Or the motion. Or the reassurance that beauty and order could coexist without noise.

What I do know is this. I admired them openly. Without irony. Without embarrassment. I saw quality. Intricacy. Purpose. And I felt safe in their presence.

Years later, I would work with machines and systems that demanded the same respect for precision my mother taught me with a bottle of glue. Procedures, tolerances, joints that either hold or fail. I did not realize it then, but that Christmas table was already shaping how I would move through the world.

Now that my mother is gone, that memory looms larger than it ever did before.

The carousels still turn in my mind, but what I see more clearly now is her hands. Patient. Exact. Teaching without lecturing. Present without hurry. I did not know, sitting on that floor, that I was being given something that would outlast her. A way of caring. A way of paying attention. A way of building things, and people, so they might endure.

This Christmas, the lights may still go off. Candles may still flicker. But the shadows on the wall carry more weight now. They remind me that love often arrives quietly, teaches by example, and leaves behind structures that keep turning long after the hands that built them are gone.

Some holidays never really end. They just return differently, carrying both warmth and absence, and asking us to remember who first showed us how to make something last.