It was 1 o’clock and I was already at the terminal for departing flights. My son was going to arrive any minute, our scheduled flight left at 2:05 pm and while I’d only been the weird man in the ugly chair for a little while, maybe 20 minutes of sleep all in, my heart was leaping, and I just couldn’t wait to see my man.

Standing in front of the video monitors, checking to see if the terminal on my boarding passes was correct, the flight status changed to “Updated,” but before I could get the attention of the sleeping woman who was giving out the information to weary christmas day travelers the status changed again to “Cancelled.” My heart hit the floor. My blood boiled a little as visions of US Airways canceling a flight on christmas day because it was underbooked began to bubble up into my mouth when I realized that everyone in front of me in line was screaming and yelling at the muslim women behind the counters.

First it was interesting that every last one of the women behind the counters were wearing a khimar, and second that they appeared to be making little tiny smiles as they told the frustrated and irate passengers from the cancelled San Francisco flight that they wouldn’t be able to fit them into any other flights until tomorrow. I tried a different approach: I smiled, spoke quietly, and waited patiently. They fit us onto the 3:45 pm flight through Las Vegas, and bumped us up to first class at no extra charge.

My son arrived. We hugged and kissed and hung around a while. We said goodbye to his mother, and then ventured through security, and into the vast dining commons of Philadelphia International where we found a pair of plain bagels, and some lemonade. After our snack, we ambled over to the gate and boarded the plane immediately, buckled into our seats and fell fast asleep. The flight was late arriving into Las Vegas, and so we disembarked, and walked over one gate, got into the our next aircraft and took off almost immediately. I slept the whole flight to San Francisco, and our bag came out first. Jill picked us up and we zoomed home.

When we got into the apartment the lights wouldn’t work… we’d been trying to determine if Santa had already been here, or if he was going to come tonight while we slept. I flipped the switches, but nothing seemed to work. I walked into the living room and began to fumble with the cords on the lamp. We were both completely confused.

Suddenly, a christmas tree lit up like a warm, beautiful surprise. My son began to shriek “Daddy! Daddy! Santa! He was here!!! I knew it! He came!” I was stunned. Yes, it seems I’d left an empty, treeless, giftless house, and returned to a magic surprise. A beautiful little tree, trimmed with lights, and a bouquet of packages laid out beneath it. There were stockings stuffed with little packages, and a huge bottle of white grape juice too. We cheered, and we danced, we hugged and we kissed, and then we closed the front door, set down our bags and began to tear the paper off of everything.

By 11pm we were sprawled out across my bed on the lower bunk, sound asleep.

A lovely christmas indeed.