I will eventually stop talking about Christmas but not today. There’s a brief time which comes every Christmas season when all the magical things in the world wake up and life feels like the happy ending to a good book. For one week, the smell of fresh cookies trails through the house even when the oven has been turned off and the cookies carefully stowed in their tins for future munching. The finest dusting of baking flour seems to linger over the kitchen counters and the air tastes sugar sweet. 

Christmas is special. Even amid the most mild winters snow falls in the mountains of Colorado to settle over the lawn like a fuzzy white comforter. Whether it be huge fluffy flakes eddying past the street lamps on Christmas Eve or the inexplicable appearance of five inches of fresh powder on Christmas morning, it always comes. 

The frosty weather heralds the arrival of a few unexpected guests and this year was no different. No matter how old I get, I can’t help squealing like a six year old with a quarter from the Tooth Fairy every time I wake up to a winter wonderland. I skipped through the house to gawk at it from every window and, sure enough, tucked in the very back of the yard beneath a mesh of plum branches and bedded down in my mom’s garden napped four Christmas deer. They stayed all afternoon, occasionally standing to stretch their long necks or burying their noses in the snow in search of fallen crabapples. Even Mother Nature knows that Christmas is a time to cherish traditions.