Annie Dillard’s mother saying each night (or I imagine it is each night, in any season; I want it to be so):

“Do you hear them?  Do you hear the bells, the little bells, on Santa’s sleigh?”

“And we could hear them coming, very faint and far away, the bells on the flying sleigh.”

–pg. 37-38, An American Childhood

Maybe the bells are always there –the little girl in the plaza in Stare Miaso, Old Town, Krakow.  Everywhere people snapping pictures.  I try to be unobtrusive as I snap pictures of small children mesmerized by the pigeons that gather all around.

I wonder what this place was like in the dead of winter, gray as dust.  1942.  Where was the magic then?