Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve, after everyone had just settled, I was alone in the living room. I scrolled through the music on our television/media centre and decided on Anne-Sophie Mutter's Beethoven pieces.

Within a second, I heard the Christmas tree behind me: it sounded as if it was shaking. I looked behind me and saw a single decorative bulb swinging wildly on the bottom branch and this was obviously the source of the noise. The bulb was swinging but ABSOLUTELY NO OTHER part of the tree -- including the branches -- was moving in even the smallest way.

As I sat there staring at the swinging bulb, it stopped just as suddenly as it had begun, but it wasn't a gradual loss of momentum: it simply stopped.

Immediately after it stopped, the same rattling sound came from beside me and in front of the sofa: I looked and saw that a frame on the mantlepiece had slid down and its picture -- of my grandmother as a girl and which had already had the word "me" written in her own hand just above her image -- had slipped out the top of the frame.

It was nice to know that my maternal grandmother was with me for the holiday.