Comfort for all is a great seasonal wish

I dropped my youngest daughter off at her school. As she got out of the car, carrying her coat, wearing her school uniform sweater and skirt, her long legs bare in the frigid morning air, I watched her run to greet her friends.

I shook my head. How she could stand it, I wondered. No tights or long pants to protect her. But her friends were all dressed the same way. They laughed as they ran to their classroom.

As I drove away, the snow was blowing, tiny flakes landing on the windshield. The roads were clear, but slick in places. I kept my hands tight on the wheel.

I was only a few blocks from work when I saw the woman. She was picking her way carefully down the street, pushing a shopping cart across the treacherous sidewalk. The cart was piled with bags of clothing and other things. The woman would push forward for a bit, wrestling with the cart to keep it on course, and then she would have to stop to push a bag back into the pile. She paid no attention to the light, and when she stopped in the middle of the intersection, more stuffing and rearranging, she never noticed the cars that had to drive around her.

She was lost somewhere in her own mind.

I couldn’t see her face, but I could tell she wasn’t a young woman. And she wasn’t dressed for the weather. She was wearing a light dress under her sweater and jacket. A scarf was tied under her chin. Her legs were bare and mottled with cold. She wore a pair of heavy winter boots.

Sitting in my car, bundled in my heavy coat, a scarf around my neck, sunk into heated seats, I thought about my child, running across the parking lot, mindless of the cold because she was dashing from one warm, safe place to another.

She wouldn’t be uncomfortable for long.

When my children were small I sang them to sleep most nights. For a while I had them all in the same room. It was an old-fashioned nursery with a crib and two little beds, a table for tea parties and toys scattered across the floor. A snug room with everything a child could need.

Sitting in their great-grandmother’s rocking chair, holding the baby in my arms, I sang one song after another. Eventually, after several years of this, the songs blended together until they became one long lullaby. It was an odd assortment of songs: old nursery rhymes, Amazing Grace, the hymn my mother sang to me, folk tunes I remembered from my own childhood and, oddly, one Christmas carol.

I have no idea how that song got into the playlist. Perhaps, one year at Christmas time, I’d sung it a couple of times and that had been all it took. All I know is that right after “Down in the Valley,” and before “Summertime” from “Porgy and Bess,” I sang “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”

It’s a low and sweet song, and I love the unexpected use of the word comfort. That’s a wonderful thing to wish someone. To wish for ourselves.

This time of year, even when the spirit isn’t really there at all, we can decorate and party and shop ourselves into a state of manufactured joy.

But comfort is impossible to fake.

It’s a complicated season. Snowflakes and carols and children laughing in the cold are everwhere.

But for some, all that cheer must be cold comfort indeed.