I’m not quite sure where they got it — maybe we gave it to them, or perhaps they just bought it themselves. In a way it doesn’t matter. What matters is that when E found the little Leap Frog play house that was just like the one he played with as a little toddler (“Daddy, I’m not a toddler any more. I’m a little boy.”), he was utterly enchanted. He took the little house over to the small couch in the sitting area just off of the dining room in our friends’ house (they do Christmas; we do Easter; another family has taken Halloween, even though it’s not a traditional Polish holiday) and just played with it as if it were the greatest thing. I wondered for a moment if perhaps he was experiencing his first little bout of nostalgia.

I always wonder about that: what will set my kids off when they’re adults, what will send them back into the past with a certainty that times were somehow better then and a strange emptiness with the realization that those times will never return. Or maybe that’s just the stuff of romantics, and perhaps my kids won’t grow up to be nostalgic romantics.

But there are worse things than being nostalgic romantics. Nostalgic romantics get to sing Christmas carols with an abandon that others lack. The act is a time machine.

It’s what makes movies like White Christmas so charming almost seventy years later.

And that’s all I’ve got for this Christmas…