It just doesn’t seem like Christmas.

It might just be the gradual numbing of my senses – the repetitiveness of department-store decorations after two months of non-stop commercial bombardment – but today it seems especially, well, un-Christmas. The snow-threatening clouds have been shoved back by yellow sunlight and blue skies that manage, somehow, to still be bleak and cold. The grass, brown and dead, sways in a too-chilly wind between divided highways of people shopping for presents; the festive decorations on homes appear fake, commercial, a forced smile to greet an acquaintance you really wish you hadn’t run into at the party.

I wonder how, or even if, this affects my son; if I am the only one hit by this melancholy, by a complete lack of Christmas feeling.

So I ask him, simply: “Does it seem like Christmas to you?”

As he looks up at me, I see the twinkling lights reflected in his eyes coalesce into a single great star, guiding Magi and shepherd alike.

And he doesn’t have to say a word.