Christmas isn't what you think it is. It isn't contained within the waking, sometimes sleepless days of the yuletide season; it doesn't simply begin and end at those polar midnights of late December. It's not quantifiable by tallying cards and presents, not merely a protracted spree of buying and giving, wrapping and tearing, hugging and crying. Christmas, really, is more akin to music or memory than the temporal here and now; even when it's not loudly ringing out, even when it happened so long ago, you carry it within you to summon against the darkness, holding it tight against the quiet and the cold. It's something you know as a child and try your absolute hardest to forget as an adult, but the truth is that Christmas is truly, deeply, embarrassingly about that one special thing: it's love, actually.