It was a letter he needed to write.

He thought again about the church sign he’d seen after spending the entire service loathing his father.

I don’t want to spend any more time hating that man.

In his mind, he tried to picture that man he’d seen riding his old bike. The man who was still in their old house. The man who was becoming old just like that place, just like his habits.

I can still believe and I can still hope to be surprised.

His room was quiet. Thomas felt cold as usual.

What could he say?

What words were there for the man who had hurt them?

Thomas looked at the sheet of paper. For a moment all he felt was despair. Everything seemed wrong—it was the wrong kind of paper, the wrong approach, the wrong everything.

He wasn’t typically so unsure of himself.

But this was different.

In a sense, he was writing to himself, for himself, for his family.

I’m just writing a guy who was once fifteen too.

He was fifteen but knew the world was big and that roads were wide open.

It’s not where you’ve been but where you’re going.

And maybe, just maybe, Thomas could write to his father on this day, forgetting about the past and bringing them up to the present.

Hello, I’m Thomas, your son, your one and only son.

Thomas forced himself to write.

He wanted this to be as natural as if he were talking to his father in person.

He wrote the letter still believing that his Christmas presents might arrive, still hoping and believing that they would show up at the door.

Guys like Vic at school could belittle and laugh and ignore him. But they could never take away the very thing that he still considered his greatest strength.

His faith.

And this crazy notion of taking the bad and doing something good with it.

Thomas let out a deep breath and started to write the words to the man who surely didn’t want to hear them.

After he was finished, he sat there for a moment, looking at the two words right above his name.

Merry Christmas.

So common and so casual.

Christmas doesn’t have to come once a year. It can happen every day.

This faith came down to that very gift that spawned this holiday.

The point was that one gift was for the rest of the year, for the rest of ever after.

He folded the note and then left it on the tiny dresser in the corner of the room.

He could still send it out. Even after Christmas.

Gifts didn’t have to always arrive in time for Christmas.

And Christmas didn’t always have to arrive at the same time each year.

Home

The beauty of being a child was growing up full of dreams and aspirations. You always carried them around with you, these pocketfuls of potential.