Once in a Christmas day…

(by Gaby)

Everywhere I look there’s something that makes me remember. Remember the long years that had passed for us to come to this day. I’m in my bedroom getting ready for another Christmas dinner. A Christmas dinner that will be totally different from the very first one when this story began.

I was 35 years old then and I was pregnant, and that was supposed to be my first Christmas with my husband and the new life that was growing inside my body. I never imagined someone else would get into our lives that day too… Someone who would change my whole world in manners I had never imagined.

All it had taken had been a phone call telling me that when I went back to filming there would be a new “angel” on the group, helping Monica with her hard cases… When I had dinner that night and then when I opened my presents the following morning, everything was still on the same road. This new angel hadn’t come in a big box with a red ribbon, although now that I look back it pretty much felt that way.

The following Christmas everything had started to change.

Two years after that Christmas of the phone call, everything was different in my life.

Yes, my baby was now there. She had brought a light to my life as I had never imagined. But her father was no more with us. Physically he was there, but he wasn’t the man I had fallen in love to. His presence in our lives didn’t bring the peace that was supposed to bring. That peace came from the angel.

The next Christmas day was spent with my dearest friends, but although their presence was very welcome, there was a shadow that made me feel miserable. My family had fallen apart and I was loosing my daughter too. That year I experienced what I know now was the most obscure Christmas of my life. I wanted to die to stop the suffering. I didn’t want to see the light of a new day if it would only bring another day of pain and suffering. I was ready to just give up on living that night. I had received another phone call, a very different one… A man notifying me I had a new date with the judge so she would decide who would keep my daughter’s custody. I held no hope. If my life was now supposed to go on without her precious smile and her little face, I just couldn’t make it through one more day.

How I managed to chat and eat and make a toast I don’t know… The ones that had passed from being my work mates to my new family had been there, and I had smiled and joked with them. I had put my daughter in bed and with the most cold blood I had walked out of the house to the balcony to take a seat there. That would have not been strange hadn’t it been snowing. With every snowflake I saw falling I felt my own breathing coming shorter, my own body becoming cold and so unable to move one single finger. That’s when I knew he was my angel. “Roma…” he had murmured before he wrapped a warm blanked around my body and carried me in his strong arms inside the house and to the fireplace that was still burning. He had known what had been in my heart and in my mind, but he had not told me a word. He hadn’t pushed me for an explanation that I just didn’t have. He had just seated me on his lap and held me for hours until I had fallen asleep, but this time warm and secure.

His love had engulfed me like a giant wave that washed my life with new hope, and he was putting me back to the road. My heart had found a new melody the following Christmas day, but I still couldn’t hear it. Our celebration was not complete until I hear his voice on the other side of the line telling me the three tiny words I so longed to hear: I love you. What kind of love I didn’t mind. All I cared was that I was important for someone and someone cared about me enough to make me keep on living. Because that was what his love meant for me: my very reason to wake up and make it through the day looking for nothing but a smile or the small caresses we used to share at that time.

If I felt that was enough for me, I would have never dared to ask for more. Not even like a present for Christmas day. But I guess in a way Santa also can read what is in our hearts and makes his best to make it happen. ‘Cause he did make it happen. I’m sure he placed that ball of mistletoe where it was hanging and invisibly he pushed us to be standing under it and whispered in my daughter’s ear the words I still hear when I go back to that Christmas day: “You have to kiss each other!” I heard the music inside my heart that cold morning, when the traditional small peck became the most touching soul kiss I have ever received. When his lips touched mine my whole world reduced to him and what he represented for me. My hands ran the length of his arms touching not only his strong muscles but his tenderness and his security, and the promise of a future I’m still living on.

That future that became my present the day he placed that ring on my finger, in another Christmas dinner making a promise he has fully kept till now. From that on, my Christmas had been nothing but days full of smiles and laughter and love and tears of happiness. Like the ones he cried when I told him he would become a father, again because he had adopted my daughter since he had first met her. Like the ones we both cried when Reilly came back home hand in hand with a blond boy to tell us she was getting married. Tears that run out of your eyes without noticing like when our second daughter, Monica, gave birth to a chubby baby making us all forget about the turkey that was getting cold on our table.

As I walk to the window on my bedroom with a candle on my hands to burn it in the night, I look to the garden where there the laughing of wee children reach my ears and fill my heart with happiness and thankfulness. My angel is there, letting a six year old and two three years old making him fall on the snow. I climb down to the living room and then walked to the garden where I can see the whole scene. His hair is now not shining blond but gray, still he is as handsome to me as he was the day I saw him with completely different eyes.

All of a sudden his eyes met mine and I feel my knees getting weak, my breath catching in my throat and my whole body aching for his arms to hold me. Who cares it has been more than thirty years since the first Christmas when his path cross my life to change my life forever? He might not be now the dashing bachelor with a thousand of girls drooling for him, but I’m no longer the tinny sexy Irish actress I was too. We’ve grown older but what has get not a single wrinkle is the love we still feel for each other and that gets stronger each day I wake up and feel his arms around my body and hear his hoarse, half-sleeping voice saying “Good morning, beautiful”.

He walks to me and holds me by the waist as if we were still those newly weds that couldn’t stop kissing each other. When his lips collide with mine I forget about anything else. “There’s no mistletoe in here” I teased him.

“I don’t need mistletoe not even the day to be Christmas to want to kiss you” he replies with a sincerity that makes my heart ache with love for him. The dialogue between our eyes lasts a couple of seconds more and we surrender to the sweetest caress we cannot give up.

It is Christmas eve and we’ll be spending it together again. Old friends have given their places to children that now have children of their own. We’ll remember auntie Della in the smile of the sweet eight year old that has her name, and uncle Franklin in the sleeping face of our youngest grandson, Monica’s second baby. And if snow falls tonight, I won’t walk out to seat in the cold and wait till an angel rescues me. It was just one dark moment that happened once in a Christmas day…