Most mornings before school, Jocelyn gets up at 5-something and practices ballet. Her schedule does not allow her to train at Chicago’s Ruth Page Center for the Arts anymore, so she works the “basics” at the barre in our dining room by herself.
I don’t usually get out of bed until 6:30 but today I had an early start and when I went downstairs, I caught her dancing in pre-dawn darkness.
“Caught” isn’t the right word. “Sensed” is more like it because it was pitch black. Though I couldn’t see or hear her, I knew she was there.
I didn’t want to interrupt her but I needed to see so I turned on the Christmas tree lights. Like Santa filling the stockings in Clement C. Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas, she briefly turned her head toward me and then “spoke not a word but went straight to [her] work.”
Several years ago, Jesse and I created a “man on the street” video where we asked several people the same question: “Do you believe in Santa?” My friend Christy, a scientist, said she did not but that she loved “Santa moments.”
Sensing my daughter in the dark, then seeing her materialize when I turned on the Christmas tree lights, then carry on her with her ballet was a “Santa moment” for me and a wonderful way to start my day.
Thanks for reading my blog. I hope you have your own “Santa moment” today. -Connie
P.S. Here’s that video.
Connie Kuntz is the producer of the Rockford Fringe, a playwright and the music and comedy director for Naked Angels Tuesdays@9 Chicago. She lives in Rockford, Illinois with her husband and four children.
Connie Kuntz 