Welcome Christmas While We Stand, Heart to Heart and Hand in Hand

I am sitting at my desk in my windowless office, inhaling a quick sushi lunch and reading a manuscript when my phone rings.

“Come into my office!” cries my boss, breathless. “You have to see this!”

I rush down the hallway and into her office, where she’s lifting the blinds to showcase her view—tall midtown office buildings, steel gray structures against the steel gray sky—dotted with the biggest, whitest, fluffiest snowflakes I’ve ever seen. They come slowly at first, then faster and faster, filling the vast spaces between the buildings. On the streets far below, pedestrians begin snapping open their umbrellas.

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” she asks, clasping her hands in delight.

“It is,” I agree.

“When I first moved to New York,” she says in her tinkling voice, “I thought it was so strange that people used umbrellas in the snow.”

A few more coworkers come into the office, and we all stand in front of the windows in companionable silence, watching the scene and forgetting for a moment our soggy sandwiches resting atop of our piles of paperwork, our full inboxes, our blinking voicemails.

“It’s like being inside a snow globe,” someone says.

So it is.