To be honest, I do know what I want someone to give me for Christmas. 

I’ve known since I was forty years old. Wind-up mechanical toys that make noises and go round and round and do funny things. No batteries. Toys that need me to help them out from time to time. The old-fashioned painted tin ones I had as a child. That’s what I want. Nobody believes me. It’s what I want, I tell you.

Well, okay, that’s close, but not quite exactly it. It’s delight and simplicity that I want. Foolishness and fantasy and noise. Angels and miracles and wonder and innocence and magic. That’s closer to what I want.

It’s harder to talk about, but what I really, really, really want for Christmas is just this:

I want to be five years old again for an hour.

I want to laugh a lot and cry a lot.

I want to be picked up and rocked to sleep in someone’s arms, and carried up to bed just one more time. I know what I really want for Christmas.

I want my childhood back.

Nobody is going to give me that. I might give at least the memory of it to myself if I try. I know it doesn’t make sense, but since when is Christmas about sense, anyway? It is about the child of now. In you and me. Waiting behind the door of our hearts for something wonderful to happen. A child who is impractical, unrealistic, simpleminded, and terribly vulnerable to joy.

~ Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten