“O-kay, Matt!” said Liz, smacking the paper and pencil down in front of Matt. She gave him a bright-eyed on your mark, get set, go! look.
Matt struggled to come up with anything at all to write about Christmas.
Every year, against his will, as Christmas approached, Matt found himself hoping.
Hope would begin a little after Thanksgiving, and it would get large and starry, and he would find himself lying awake at night, as if Hope kept his eyes from closing.
He did not know what he hoped for.
But sometimes it was so intense he had trouble breathing, and then he had to steady himself against Christmas.
Matt finished up the paragraph. As usual, he did not have much to say. As usual, he could not make anything up. For Matt, there was silence or there was truth. He could not get in between, like other people. He wrote:
There’s only one problem.
There is no Santa.