What is good about the first of January is that the world is in no particular hurry to get anywhere.
The tree is still standing there like a small domestic state: lights are blinking, ornaments hang with dignity, the last traces of the night’s miracle are living out their days beneath the branches, and the whole house still runs a little on New Year’s fuel — silence, mandarins and children’s happiness.
And today Sanya sits at the table with the expression of someone who, in earlier times, might have been entrusted with the command of galactic flotillas. Because the gift really worked: an enormous Star Wars ship, serious, almost indecently large — the sort of thing a child loves with his whole being, and an adult looks at and, honestly, envies too.
There is a special joy in mornings like this — when children still believe in miracles not out of politeness but for real; when the tree has not yet become merely an interior object, and a present is not yet just a box, already opened and forgotten.
Today the house is full of exactly that quiet strength: the new year has begun and, it seems, begun properly.
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