Deep down, I dreaded the first Christmas after my father’s death.

Since his funeral, joy had left me. How was I to find the ho, ho, ho in holidays in the face of the empty chair at the kitchen table, the missing voice in the crowd? Who was going to take up his spot as gift-passer-outer?

Gritting my teeth as I pulled into the driveway of my family home, I had no idea that healing was about to begin.
It all started that night with the Christmas Eve moon.

Glowing in the inky sky just above the rooftops like a greeting card fantasy, it seemed as though you could reach out and touch it, while thousands of snowflakes fluttered onto tree limbs like down feathers.

My mother and I drank our egg nog on the front porch, marveling at the picture-perfect scene before us, not able to pull ourselves away until the chilly winds numbed our cheeks and fingers.

Holiday tunes played from the stereo and the kitchen was warm and inviting with the gathering of friends and family.

We all looked up in unison, in mid-sentence or sip or bite, when the chandelier dimmed itself. It stayed in this state until a Frank Sinatra song played and on cue with Frank’s first note, it flared into brightness beyond its normal capacity.

Frank Sinatra had long been my parents’ all-time favorite entertainer, a voice my father spent years trying to emulate.

“What’s going on,” my sister said, her teenage son pulling nervously at his hair.

“The electrical in this old house is shot!” declared my uncle, a somewhat crusty, retired police detective.

“This is so weird,” our neighbor said. “My house is just as old and I’ve never had a light do that on its own.”

“I think it’s Dad!” I blurted, just as the chandelier turned on its high beams again, and in spite of myself, I laughed out loud.
Lights throughout the house went haywire that night, especially the sconce in the upstairs hallway that lit every time I passed by—an occurrence that sent my 14-year-old nephew hiding under bed covers.

On behalf of her son, my sister demanded that someone prove to him that this was all somebody’s idea of a bad joke.
The ex-detective uncle took the charge.

“How can you be afraid of a little light?” he growled while standing on the stairway landing, directly across from the wall sconce under investigation. “You see, it’s off, it’s nothing. Watch this.”

He stuck his tongue out at the light, thumbs tauntingly stuck in his ears, grinning from ear to ear.

And the light popped on.

My nephew jumped back under the covers just as my uncle turned and leapt to the bottom of the stairs. “Maybe he is here,” my uncle whispered in wide-eyed fright to my mother. “He would think that was funny.”

I could almost hear my dad, somewhere in the distance, doubled over in laughter.

Christmas morning opened with a fresh rash of mysterious goings-on.

“Look,” my mother said as she opened the kitchen cupboard. “That drip is gone!” The pan under the main pipe was dry and the years of a perpetual drip that baffled the most experienced plumber was over.

But what really tickled my mother was that someone installed the storm door, even though it had swelled and shifted shape during the summer and was condemned by all as never going to fit that doorway.

She was determined to find the perfectly logical explanation. Mother questioned everyone and canvassed the neighbors, only to get odd looks and no confessors.

“It had to be one of the neighbors, as a Christmas gift to me,” she said, but her chuckle was strained.

Knowing I was the only one in the house that felt safe and sound and happier than I had in six months, I kept my thoughts on the subject to myself.

You can’t see or touch the holiday spirit, but we know it’s there. That warm embracing feeling you get with every waft of the Christmas tree, that tingle when you read your name on a gift tag, that sappy humming to a familiar carol. If the holiday season can magically create a circle of love and light, could it not be powerful enough to attract the spirit of a loved one passed?

All I can tell you is that I was given the greatest gift of my life—I got to spend one more Christmas with my Dad.

 And, yes Virginia, I do believe there’s a Santa Claus.