Christmas is unique because I think as humans it is when we are the most nostalgic. A lot of it occurs as we get out our decorations. We remember where most every ornament and decoration came from, and even who may have given it to us.

Yesterday I was speaking with one of my good friends I have made as an adult. The thing that is so funny about us knowing each other is we basically should have known each since we were teenagers. We have led parallel lives in the friends we had.

We knew so many of the same people yet never met until middle age. This friend she says to me last night that we probably met at parties or in bathroom lines at old Main Line haunts and never realized it. Which is so true – she was even a hostess once at the same restaurant as one of my oldest and best friends.

Six degrees of separation. Literally. Last night she asked me how I knew a couple more people she also knew so we got to talking about this guy we once knew. Not a boyfriend, a friend.

Now I know every time a woman or man speaks of a friend of the opposite sex, so many want to make something else out of it. But she, like me, has always had male friends. Some of my oldest friends in the world were boys I first met in grade school. I married a boy I was friends with in high school and fell in love with as an adult. But that’s the exception and not the rule.

This one person we knew in common was a friend we shared in different stages of his life. She knew him early on, I knew him in the succeeding years for a while. It’s like that phrase people say about people in our lives: reason, season, or lifetime. He was a season in both of our lives.

He is someone who experienced tragedy and unpleasantness early on, so I hope his life is happy now. He deserves that. My friend and I both agree. It was just so funny in the timeline of our lives. If we all had just actually met a little bit earlier, we would have been friends at the same time.

And it’s funny we both had the same impression of this person at the stages of life we knew him. He was what you would describe as an old soul. He was a total outdoorsman yet he wrote music, poetry. To some reading this that might sound weird, but it wasn’t. He was just deep, and he was deep at a time when we were at the age to be frivolous.

When I started to stop knowing him, he was preparing to move across the country to build a life elsewhere. I still have the letter he wrote me when he was moving. He was a really good person. Still is I am sure, just elsewhere.

That’s the thing about this season, as in the Christmas season, you remember those people sometimes. Just as we remember relatives who were dear (and not so dear) to us. It’s part of the human condition of sentimentality.

I actually have had something happen as a blogger that never happened before, and I am chalking it up to Christmas. Someone contacted me to ask me to pass contact information to a relative.

I would never divulge information EVER, but I did pass the information along. It’s Christmas so you never know. Maybe whatever made them lose touch is enough in the past that they could reconnect.

To some of my readers this post will be dull as dishwater. To others, it might strike a chord.

I hope you all continue to enjoy the magic of the season. A little Christmas magic and love is good for all of us.

Pax