Sisters.

"Smile and act like you like each other!"

There's something about this time of year that makes me wish I was a kid again. It's not about the presents, the magic of Christmas that doesn't quite carry into adulthood, or the great holiday cartoons like Charlie Brown and Frosty. I wish I could be a young girl again so I could giggle under the Christmas tree with my sisters while rattling unopened gifts, feeling the shapes of lumpy sweaters through the wrapping paper in anticipation. What I wouldn't give to spend one more rainy Christmas morning sitting with our three pairs of little bare feet on the heat vent in the living room floor, warm air filling our long home-made nightgowns and blowing our hair as it wafted through our flannel collars. My sisters are on the other side of the country now. They're still Yankees up in the Northwest and Utah, so far away. And we're adults now, so there's a good chance we would argue about politics or parenting styles over our mashed potatoes and be disappointed that Christmas isn't what it was when we were little.
     The Downton Abbey writer was on a pre-Season Four special last week. He talked about the precarious relationship that sisters share, and how sister relationships are always romanticized onscreen. He wanted Lady Mary and Lady Edith to show what sisterhood really looks like. So they hate each other! Sometimes in my childhood home, sisterhood looked like rival gangs facing off over a territorial dispute. It was more "oil and water" than "bridge over troubled waters". But we loved each other and still do.
     My Grandma lost a sweet little sister to appendicitis before the Depression. She missed little Joanne all her long life, taught all of her descendants about her, passed her name and tender trinkets and memories down to the next three generations. Joanne's tiny baby ring is one of my greatest inherited treasures, a ring from a long-gone aunt dead almost a hundred years ago but kept alive in a sister's heart. I never heard about Grandma's lost loves, or lost fortunes, or lost dreams. But I knew the talents and passions and personality of that lost little sister. It makes me think that years from now I'll be sitting in a nursing home calling out for my sisters, unaware that poor Jason ever existed. Sisters are special and I've been so blessed.

Home-spun sugar and spice lip balm in Branson.