Happy Holidays

I woke up early on Christmas day, jumped out of bed and ran over to my Christmas tree. There it was, the Christmas present! It was a charming pink and white box with blue ribbons flowing down its corners.

I gently tore open the ribbons, with nimble fingers. But I was nervous because I never believed in Santa Claus before this day. I opened the box with trepidation although I knew that it was a Christmas present. Who was it really from? Santa Claus? Really?

The top opened to reveal a cake! It looked heavenly, a vanilla cake finished with a buttercream frosting and decorated with icing, strawberries and dragées. My right index finger proceeded towards the buttercream as if it had a mind of its own. I resisted at the very last moment, my mind screaming for closure. Who was it from?

I threw myself onto a sofa, dejected. I decided to wait for a little while, so that whoever had put the cake at the tree would definitely want to know whether it had reached its intended recipient, and give me a call?

I made myself some tea, had some eggs and bread, and soon I was feeling quite fine. I then stood up, in what seemed like one single motion and stretched my arms and legs, and while my body twisted and writhed with my frosty muscles, my eyes accidentally fell on the pink and white box under the tree. It was the only box, I thought. It couldn't have been for anybody else.

I grew impatient. I would have the cake, I decided. But I wanted to do it ceremoniously, so I didn't use my kitchen knife to cut it. I would go out and get myself a plastic cake knife, preferably with a ribbon on its handle.

Off I ran to my local departmental store and got myself the cake knife, and since it was a nice, sunny morning, I thought of taking a stroll, and return home using a different albeit longer route.

The day was truly fine, and the few people on the streets looked really happy. Christmas is probably the loneliest day of the year for streets. Even the most heavily populated streets are deserted on Christmas day!

A faint tune caught my ear. I moved towards it and found two buskers. They were a team made up of a teenage girl and a teenage boy. Kudos to them to have braved the cold and come out on to the empty streets to perform, and on a day when they had almost no audience.

The tune sounded familiar. It took me some time, but it was the tune of the song Instant Crush by the French electronic band Daft Punk. It was a beautiful tune, with a very fast tempo, so I was really taken by the talent of the young boy with his guitar rendition. But what the little girl did was even more mind-blowing.

While he played, she painted. On a large sheet of paper propped up on a piece of cardboard, she painted at the speed of sound, and it was astonishing because one couldn't tell who was performing faster, the boy or the girl.

She painted the figures of a young man and a woman, very similar to the one’s shown on the video of Instant Crush. The figures in the video were made of wax – a French soldier and a female peasant, beautiful and intricately detailed, but the painter was no slouch either. She brought the figures to life, as if the love story were unfolding not on celluloid, but on the empty streets in front of my eyes!

I stood there through the whole performance in awe, speechless. I was bowled over. Then I walked back in a daze, climbed up the stairs to my apartment hallucinating, sat on a sofa with the cake knife in one hand and my mouth in my other.

I couldn't eat that luscious cake by myself. I sat for another five minutes and let my emotions sink in. Then I took the cake and walked back out, till I reached them. I handed them over the cake, and the knife, said Merry Christmas, and walked back home again.

It was a most amazing Christmas day!

In this dog-eat-dog world, where people tend to bite you if you are happy, I had forgotten what real beauty looked like. I had forgotten the meaning of art. I had forgotten all about nature and how beautiful she really was. Suddenly, being a human being made sense to me again.

Who put the cake under my tree I will never know, but who it was meant for could not have been clearer. It was a divine moment, one that occurred without any need or reason, but only with a need to be felt and experienced just for the sake of it.

There isn't words to express these feelings, and I don’t intend to be any more verbose to elucidate the structure and function of the events of that day. I explain things for a living and today I’ll take a day off.