Christmas used to be plainer, simpler affair. Santa was REAL, so I read, to the American children growing here. He makes faithful yearly visits to homes when the families are sleeping!
And so a nod to the Ballesteros who wants to keep the celebration 'modest', and have the 2 children bewildered believing that it's all true – a gift itself, I thought!
Today is Boxing Day!
We gathered again for a dinner at Daly City, at our favorite restaurant, chomping missed-home-food –
roti prata/ fried kueh teow/ prawn noodle/ satay/ rendang..!
We then marched out into the cold to this ONCE IN A WHILE Cafe, ending the evening of family-gathering on a warm note – grateful for loved ones, near and far!
Indeed the greatest gift we can ever own is not found in the shops or under the Christmas tree – it is found in the hearts of loving family!
We thank God for the golden privilege and pleasure to gather in USA for a Christmas Dinner, mindful that we may not meet like this again!
Someone sent me this note from Heaven!!
It's all so surreal – very scriptural and comforting but it has indeed this oddly dreamlike quality!
It's a Saturday. The Ballesteros are at the Church in a rehearsal for this Christmas Sunday. I'm all alone in this lovely remodeled home which was tragically twice flooded.
I love being alone.
I cherish being alone.
I do!
But this time 'alone' rings with a strange feeling & becomes an expression that spells strange finality – grief & abandonment.
Being alone & gonna stay alone when I return home in January to Casuarina for the New Year, without KokLeong this time, is going to be a challenging 'discipline'!
God help me!
Beginning to write again..
Beginning to look up 'boldly' for pictures/memory taken with KokLeong recently not long ago.
Someone wrote:
'Memory is not just a then, recalled in a now;
the past is never just the past..
Memory is a pulse passing through all created life, a waveform.
a then continually becoming other thens,
all the while creating a continual
but almost untouchable now".
