My forward-fold-breathe-in-the-space Christmas.

This is for you. You can hang it on your fridge. I used ALL the golden colors.

- B., 5 years old, as she handed me a picture of colorful scribbles

This is the first Christmas I remember in a long time that I’m spending on my own. In fact, I think it may be the first. H is in New York with O. My other siblings are gathered in Atlanta to be near their mother and each other. And others that are near and dear are, well...not so geographically near.

Later today, I won’t be alone. A couple friends will be gathering for eggs and coffee and pancakes in my kitchen. There will be Christmas Eve under the stars in a little church beside the sea. Christmas Dinner with paper crowns and brightly colored crackers. But each morning this holiday season, I have woken up alone. And so, too, this Christmas Eve morning. There is stillness in this, stillness and a beauty in This Moment where all is quiet, the tree is lit, and I sit in bed writing with a cup of hot tea nearby and Petey curled up beside me.

A dear friend told me recently that I write often and most about memory. And it is true. It comes from a place, I think, of wanting to remember what and who is no longer here; remembering brings them back for just bit. So, no surprise, I’m all about tradition - almost obsessively so. I literally cannot go to New York this time of year and not go see the tree at Rock Center. It pulls me to it like a magnet. And I've paid crazy money to have a bottle of Glogg shipped to Hawaii simply to have the smell fill my kitchen for an evening. But this Christmas has been different. I haven’t had a cup of glogg. Or Swedish meatballs. Or bitten into a saffron bun.

But I have walked on the beach plenty, even in the rain. Especially in the rain. And there have been rainbows. Rainbows everywhere.

This morning I am thinking of and missing the whirlwind that is being with my family in Atlanta for the holidays where someone is always making a new pot of coffee or pies or darting off to the grocery store. There's always a game going on or an animal caught in the Christmas tree. And I dare you to make it from wherever you’ve found a place to sleep to the bathroom without being shot by a foam dart.

But in the end, I think today is just the way it should be.

In yoga, after we’ve done a lot twists, the teacher always brings us back to neutral. We stand still in downward dog or in a forward fold taking in the effects of the work we just did and allowing ourselves time to breathe before moving onto what will come next.

This is that Christmas. My forward-fold-breathe-in-the-space Christmas.

This is the time to wake up on my own, to stand at the kitchen counter in silence drinking coffee and eating buttered gingerbread cookies on a rainy, tropical morning while looking at the picture made for me by B. She used ALL the gold colors, you know. And I feel them all filling me up.

This is that time between what came before and what comes next.