CHASING DOWN THE MUSE:Where do you find your Christmas?

On this day a week before Christmas 2006, I have fled the warmth of home to sit on this bluff top overlooking the sea.

My task for this morning is to write my last column of the year.

I am in search of a sense of the holiday spirit. Why here? What will the column be about?

These are just some of the questions that play in my mind as my eyes gaze far over the glistening sea.

A small, spotted finch hops across the dust near the edge of the bluff. Fishing boats, with their accompaniment of scavenger birds, ply the waters of the cove in a leisurely manner. A small plane flies low overhead. A lone bicyclist pedals the bike trail.

Sun shimmers on the rippling deep blue of the water. Peace. Calm. Goodwill. Silence. These seasonal attributes seem to reign here and now in this space and time.

This picture is what lies in front of me.

Behind me lie the noises of the highway as commerce, industry, and the holiday hustle and bustle all continue on their merry way.

Is it all in the “direction” we look? In our perspective? Is our sense of the Christmas spirit no more than the matter of a slight turn?

In a recent e-mail my friend chastised herself for her own self-absorption while sick during the holiday season when her own good friend lost all that she had — husband, home, and possessions. The friend’s losses had caused her to make a small turn, to count her own blessings.

I wondered at the mother of the two-year-old who was distraught and frantic trying to find the gift she wanted for her young son. Would he even know the difference in the midst of all the festivities? What turn might she make for a change in perspective?

We’ve all heard the complaints about the lost “spirit” of the holiday season. Well, here on this bluff top, I feel I might just have found it — at least for myself. I’ve made my own slight turn.

Though a recent illness has meant there is no tree at my house, no stockings hung — with or without care — no gifts to flow from under a tree even if there were one, I seem to have lost my attachment to these accoutrements of the holiday season.

Spirit is not really about any of those things, is it?

As I gaze off into the distance, a cooling breeze caressing my sun-warmed skin, memories of long ago holidays rise to the surface.

As I sift through these memories a silly, small, nagging question begs for an answer — what WAS that pink can of stuff I used for “snow” in those days before spray cans of the stuff existed?

In the mind’s eye of memory I find myself placing porcelain ballerinas on a mirror-pond of “ice,” with snow whipped up out of that now-mysterious pink can. The trees edging the pond were clumps of juniper trimmed from the yard, berry-balls clinging as decoration, just as the pungent smell clung to my fingertips as I worked.

No mirror in the house was safe from my heavy-handed applications of snow as I went about with that pink can trying from my perspective to create the holiday spirit ‘round the house.

There would not have been a Christmas tree or any gifts. The only preparations would have been family cookie-baking, my father’s cherry pies, and the polishing of wood floors — undertaken by us all, large and small — ‘til they shone.

We knew that Santa was going to bring the gifts and the decorated tree on Christmas Eve. We never questioned that as we set out the plate of cookies and glass of milk on Christmas Eve.

We were never disappointed, either, though I have since heard that there was a very cold year when there were no green trees to be found on the closed lots Christmas Eve. Santa drove and drove that night, trying to find one. I guess he finally did.

The spirit of the holiday season is for each of us slightly different, but it is about how we spend our time, not our money. I have found my own spirit right here overlooking the ocean. Have you found yours yet? If not, maybe that slight turn, a shift in perspective, will create its return.

“It is Christmas in the heart that puts Christmas in the air.”