At the moment, my aim is a combination of verbal images, most of them from a child's view of Christmas. So, presents are a must (although I remember my own childhood Christmases with a great deal of guilt over how badly I took not getting the most expensive everything available). I need to particularize them. I also need to mention winter sports and pastimes--in some way. I'm sure I must have had "Flexible Flyer" as one of my images. I had one that I took mile-long rides on down the little hill our house was on."

The Christmas edition of "Walt Disney Comics" was hugely important to me, too. Maybe I'll use a visual image from the story I most liked from one such edition. It featured Scrooge, Donald and Donald's three nephews.

Food: the standard turkey dinner we always had, and I loved. Currier and Ives, too. Christmas then and now seems to me always a visit to simpler (fantasized) times. It doesn't just make children of Americans, but a child of the country, back in the nineteenth century.

Christmas carols. But not religion. I'm afraid Christmas never seemed religious to me, although I was a choirboy in Christmas Eve services five years in a row. I wasn't opposed to the religious aspect of the holiday, just unaware of it--except in the superficial sense of knowing it was a celebration of the birth of Jesus.

I haven't yet come up with a fresh image--unless you count the Flexible Flyer. That's the way I usually tackle jobs like this one: trudge down the obvious paths until something knocks me into a fruitful path. Or an obvious path deepens out of the too-true. More tomorrow, I hope.