There is always beauty in the world and it doesn’t come from the mall or from frantic human merry-making.

It is always available, given graciously and freely by the natural world around us in the graceful arc of birch branches under snow, or the great silver coin of a full moon suspended in the winter sky.

My father famously remarks every year that “Christmas is at our throats again.” He is not, categorically, a Little Ray of Sunshine, and for my whole life I have rolled my eyes when he says this, appeased him with fruitcake and gone on about the business of making holiday magic.

This year, his genetic contribution is manifesting in me.

It has been gloomy here, and my mother is gone. My son, almost 17, is too old for the reading of Olive, The Other Reindeer, and actually forgot about the Advent box I have filled for him every year with tiny treats of money, candy and toys.

I have, sometimes, a feeling that everything that Christmas should be is evading me, and I resent it.

I realized, yesterday, that Christmas is less than two weeks away and we still have no tree, I have baked no cookies, and I have not seen a single “Rudolph,” “Frosty,” “White Christmas” or (my personal favorite) “Love, Actually.”

The long window box that hangs from our porch is not, as it usually is by now, filled with an assortment of pine boughs, holly and mistletoe, because a tree fell on the house and demolished it. I have bought gifts, but they aren’t wrapped, and I can’t seem to get myself excited about the usual ritual of putting on a Christmas CD, making myself a cup of hot chocolate with a candy cane in it, and blazing through piles of gifts, ribbon and paper with bits of Scotch tape stuck to the back of my hand.

We decided not to do lights because of the damage to the porch and roof, and it seems unbearably sad not to have the tiny white lights wound around our porch columns to brighten the long, winter nights.

Desperate to find some holiday spirit, I noticed several mostly-empty jars of peanut butter in the pantry, and thought about my father making pine cone feeders for the birds. He is 85 now, and it’s too hard for him to maintain his traditional routine of putting out seed, suet cakes and other delights for the birds.

He trained me well, though. The peanut butter triggered a memory of sitting at the kitchen table in childhood, spreading peanut butter onto pine cones, rolling them in seed and hanging them like small Christmas gifts for the Cardinals, Blue jays, Grosbeaks and Tufted Titmice. We knew that the squirrels would find a way to get their fat, fluffy bodies onto the slenderest of filaments in order to steal a snack, and nobody much minded—squirrels have to eat, too.

And so, although I had a list of things that really needed doing, I went to hunt for pine cones in the woods near my father’s house. While I was there, I clipped some holly. Later, we bought a Christmas tree and carried the boxes of ornaments and stockings down from the attic.

After the groceries were bought and stored, the laundry was humming, and my husband and son had started the annual business of adjusting the tree in its stand so that it pointed towards the ceiling rather than the North wall, I assembled my pine cones, the peanut butter jars, a knife and a bag of tiny seeds. Channeling my childhood self, I began to spread the nubbly shapes with peanut butter and roll them in seed, imagining the delight of some tiny feathered creature as he discovered one last beak-full of food tucked between the little shingles.

Humming something, which turned out to be “Silent Night,” I found some yarn in my craft stash, and went into the cold, dark night to hang them from trees near our ground floor windows.

As I sat writing at my desk this morning, a flash of brightest red caught my eye.

I looked up, and outside my window was a Cardinal, regal in his red cap with its jaunty feather even as he tried to hold on to the pine cone and eat his fill of nut butter and seeds. That lovely, red bird against the stark background of bare trees and gray sky was, for me, a miracle.

In that moment, before he flew off to his family, I felt the warmth of connection to my father the bird lover, myself as a child, and the possibility of tiny, startling and beautiful occurrences that give us hope.

This Christmas is different, my family is changing, and nothing can stay the same forever.

There is always beauty in the world, though, and it doesn’t come from the mall or from frantic human merry-making. It is always available, given graciously and freely by the natural world around us in the graceful arc of birch branches under snow, or the great silver coin of a full moon suspended in the winter sky. The natural world is always in flux; even as I admire a crystalline icicle there are miniscule seeds growing beneath the cold, damp earth. I have been trying desperately to hang on to seasons past, but the truth is that everything changes.

Sometimes, if we hustle, budget, strive, and calculate we can create a holiday that looks like it “should,” from the perfect tree in the front window to the ancestral bowl of figgy pudding after the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. If we are blessed with material wealth, we might even be able to give our loved ones everything they want in boxes with bright ribbons.

Sometimes, though, if we stop trying to make things happen as they should, we are given the gift of a Cardinal on a pine cone.

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Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photo: Gord Bell, on Flickr