My mother, with her loving, endearing, maternal tyranny, refused to allow Christmas its entrance until Thanksgiving had properly departed. No carols before their time. No tinsel prematurely gleaming. Yet those weeks that followed – a brief, shimmering passage between turkey and presents – became, and remain still, the most treasured coordinates on my map of childhood.

Time operated differently then. A fortnight stretched into what felt like seasons. Each morning, I raced to the Advent calendar with an urgency that now seems almost comic, tearing back those little cardboard doors as though they concealed not chocolate but prophecy itself. We may have done this only one year, perhaps two – memory is such a generous liar – but it lives in me as if we’d done it every year since the beginning

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