When I was a kid, my mother took us every Christmas to visit Jordan Marsh, a department store in the Colonial Plaza Mall in Orlando, Florida. We ate at the restaurant (I can’t remember the name of it now; was it the Oak Room?) and then went to the toy department and visited Santa. But what I remember best are the balloons. They were navy blue and imprinted with snowflakes; and when you blew up the balloon, the snowflakes got bigger and bigger. Snow, to me then, was unimaginable: a myth, a fairy tale. So to inflate that balloon and watch the snowflakes appear was to participate in something magical, otherworldly.
Now, forty odd years later, at the beginning of December, I am typing these words from Minnesota where the sky is the same deep blue as those balloons, where snow is not a myth at all. Magic still happens. I believe. I believe. I believe

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