In keeping with the spirit of things this holiday season, I invite you to settle back and enjoy this story within a story about my family.

Since Mother’s Day – when as you may remember my daughter Avery gifted me a drive out into nature and we got lost but then we found our way back home – I’ve been focusing hard on reframing the constraints caused by the pandemic: There’s what we CAN’T do, yes, but there’s also so much we CAN do if we just try to think about it a bit more creatively.
 
So as the winter holidays approached, capping off a year of mounting discontent and distress, I decided that I would try to be more intentional about the regular things of life, such as: prettying up the front patio for a socially-distanced yet gorgeous Hanukkah celebration when Avery was still in quarantine from her flight home from college; and putting throw pillows, outdoor rugs, blankets and oil lamps around the fire pit to make it feel like a cozy outdoor room. I was trying to show my family that while I can't change or erase the mundanity and same old-same old perpetrated by the pandemic or the effects of social distancing, I can try to make our gatherings more meaningful. In particular I was trying to show my kids – who like all young adults are being hit hard by this thing – that they matter.

My husband Dan got into it by suggesting that the usual effort to decorate the tree would be a full blown event this year, complete with music and treats. This year's tree is smaller because they're in short supply in our neck of the woods, and at first this felt like a limitation, but dontcha know, it fits really well in the living room and we can easily get around to the back. Our son Sawyer created a playlist with requests including The Pogues, Pentatonix, Roberta Flack, David Foster, Leslie Odom Junior, the Nutcracker, and Dan Fogelberg, and then he strung the lights. I opened the french doors to the back yard to let the music travel. 

When it came time to decorate the tree, its small size turned into an opportunity to be very intentional about which ornaments to hang on its branches and which would have to stay behind in the box. I took orders for eggnog and hot cider while Mom chose from among ornaments that are decades old. A piece from the Nutcracker came on, and our ballet dancer Avery pirouetted and leapt around the room. When I dropped a small glass ball and it shattered on the floor, Sawyer announced "we're officially decorating the tree now!" and hopped off to find the vacuum while Avery knelt and picked pieces off the floor. We continued decorating and sipping drinks and eating treats. When the Love Theme From St. Elmo's Fire came on, Dan and I slow danced in the yard – it was our wedding song – and we delighted in seeing in the faces of our young adults that they are not grossed out that their parents are still very much in love. Our tree was soon complete. We went out back to my mom's cottage where she has a second, tiny, tree in a pot on the table on her patio. We helped her decorate it. Then the playlist gave us "Waltz of the Flowers" from the Nutcracker and we four stood rapt on the edge of the lawn watching Avery perform choreography she had known for years. Dan and Sawyer held on to each other in a tight embrace. It was an unexpected and breathtaking dip into a different time. We clapped when Avery's dance was over, and she thanked us for caring enough to watch even though there were missed entrances and she didn't recall all the choreography. It seems that maybe she didn't quite realize until then how much we'd enjoyed watching her grow up as a dancer in eleven seasons of the Nutcracker. She knows now. We finished the evening with more drinks around the fire pit in the new cozy outdoor living room space. I wanted it to last forever. 
 
Back in late November, during one of my daily coffee visits with Mom, I'd begun talking about the Winter Solstice. It's always an opportunity to celebrate the end of the darkness and the expansion of the light. But having endured a year we very much want to leave behind and anticipating a new year that offers a different way forward, might it be meaningful, I wondered aloud to Mom, for the five of us to watch the sun rise on the Winter Solstice? Mom was intrigued. We knew we needed to find out when exactly does the sun rise, and where can you get a good look at it? So, in the wee hours of the morning on November 21, Mom and I trekked out in my Jeep Wrangler to pin it all down. It was an adventure – even a bit harrowing at times, which I didn't realize until I read Mom's story about it which I'll share with you below. (Because she’s going to join me as co-author of my next book—a mother daughter memoir about our decision to live together as adults—I thought it would be a treat to give you a feel of what Dr. Jean Lythcott sounds like...)

November 19^th. Julie and I greet each other for our early morning coffee. Today Thanksgiving is on our minds. We are a bubble of two houses and are clearly not planning to add other people. Julie begins to imagine what we might do to create positive experiences for the family during the holidays. She focuses on the idea of the Winter Solstice as an event of the Earth, the day that has the least amount of sun, the day before the sunlight starts growing again. Maybe it would be special for all of us to see that final, darkest-day’s sun together. Julie looks up the time of sunrise, it is circa 6.45. We both get into the complex issue of dawn, sunrise and day: when does the dark night sky give way to the light, when do the rosy red colors appear and how fast does it happen? I promise to do some research the following morning.
 
November 20^th. At 6:00 seen from my bedroom window the northwestern sky is a moonless dark. I quickly put on warm clothes and slippers and open the front door to the southeast. To my astonishment the sky there is truly lightened by the still-hidden sun. It is so weird that I have to check the sky at the back of my cottage and sure enough, it is indeed dark there. I watch the sky closely for other changes, colors perhaps, but there are no other manifestations. For a slightly different view I walk into Maybell Way toward the main road. There’s a distinctly brighter sky there in the southeast that promises the sun is on its way. Noting it is now 6:30 I run back into the house where, as expected, my alarm clock is broadcasting alarm. Hushing it, I quickly set up the coffee maker and go outside again. It is 6:38. In that 8 minutes a thin band of vibrantly hued clouds of gorgeous reds and orange has gathered at the end of Maybell Way. Something, maybe sunrise, seems to have happened but I can’t tell because the horizon at the end of Maybell Way is all trees and buildings, more sunrise isn’t supposed to happen until closer to 7:00. 
 
At 8:00 Julie appears for our morning coffee and I report my findings. She says we need to figure out when the sky starts to lighten, and how much time elapses between that point and sunrise. I tell Julie that I’ll go out tomorrow morning, shortly after 5:00, to a place nearby where we once went to see a full lunar eclipse. The view of the Bay below was always terrific there. My idea is to sit in my car at that spot watching for answers to all our questions. Julie says she’d like to come too and drive us in the Jeep - such a lovely idea – a team of two on a mission.
 
November 21. We meet in the driveway at 5:12. It is pitch black out. The Jeep is already warm. I climb in and we confidently set off to the viewing place. We turn on Deer Creek Road, by the horse barns where I used to take Sawyer and Avery on Gaga field trips. Julie swings the Jeep around so we are facing that great view of the Bay. But the sun comes up farther south and a large hill that I’ve never noticed before stands between us and where the sun will rise. What to do? It is now 5:25.
 
Julie says we need to go to higher ground and drives away intending to put us up on Skyline Drive. We take Page Mill, which wends and winds up the mountain as we leave highway 280 behind. We pass the entrance to Foothills Park. From there on the journey becomes a hazardous experience as the road climbs steeply up through the forest. It’s dark. There are no street-lights. There is no moonlight. The Jeep headlights are all we’ve got. The road is a set of tightly-angled S-bends, climbing up the mountain. Julie downshifts to first to meet the steepest curves. The road is narrow. The two lanes seem to be hardly wide enough if any traffic decided to come down. Julie is hugging the center line and I feel like I am being hurled out into space at every right-hand bend of every S. I strangle my screams and squeals as it goes on and on seemingly forever. I think we’ve been climbing for 25 minutes. Nothing to do, nowhere to go except upwards as I sink deeper into the seat with every turn.
 
Julie, however, is at one with her Jeep, they are a unit, more than the sum of the two of them, at home in this nightmare and holding me safe. She reports seeing the sky lightening to an inky purple. At 5:50 we reach Skyline and I begin to breathe again. Julie turns us to go south in search of a lookout point. Skyline is covered on both sides with trees. We keep glimpsing the Bay ablaze with night lights but there is nowhere to stop safely.
 
Julie decides we are losing altitude and does a U-turn on Skyline in pursuit of the lookout she knows is north of Page Mill. Deep red streaks appear low on the horizon behind us and the dark is beginning to give way. We are in search of sunrise but driving away from it in a desperate search for a lookout point.  Minutes later we find it. It’s closed off with barriers and cones but Julie can squeeze the Jeep through. She pulls in, backs up so we have the full view of the Bay and, dang, there is a great hill, in the southeast, blocking our view of sunrise again. We get out to see if, as we walk closer to the edge, we can see around that hill. No way! It’s cold and windy. Julie scurries back inside the jeep. I hang on a few more moments then join her.
                 
To get out of the lookout spot and back onto Skyline Drive headed south is difficult. Julie has to squeeze between poles on the road that prevent traffic turning into the lookout from the inside lane. She did it! Once on Skyline, she is determined to come down off the mountain by a different road – Arastradero – because maybe it will have a lookout. She is still chasing sunrise. I heave a huge but silent sigh of relief that we don’t have to go back on Page Mill. It is a long drive south on Skyline, longer than Julie has imagined. She keeps expecting Arastradero to intersect and we are driving into the increasingly lighted sky that now has streaks of brighter red. Eventually there is a left-hand turn off and sure enough a real, two-lane highway takes us down out of the hills. It’s Big Basin Road. Arastradero was nowhere to be found. Eventually on level ground at last and at a T-junction we join a road that quickly takes us into Saratoga of all places!  We are much farther south than we realized.

It is now 6:30. Julie wants us to be in place to see sunrise which is at 6:53. On the Solstice, we’ll bring the family and we need to know where sunrise IS. She sees a slight elevation to the right in the parking lot for a library that faces southeast. She pulls us into the lot and searches for the horizon but it is all trees and buildings. She seems ready to sit where we are and wait for sunrise … the whole purpose of this adventure… but I want to find a better place.  I had said earlier that perhaps we ought to head to the Baylands and now I say it again. Julie and her steed take off. As we leave, I announce, “We went to see the sunrise and met Saratoga instead!” I have no real sense of where Saratoga is or how far we are from Palo Alto but before long we are on 280 going north and Julie hurls us toward the Page Mill exit. She gets off, drives us back to Deer Creek Road, our original destination when we set off at 5:12a.m. Now we can tell where the sun will come up, and that this little hill that vexed us close to ninety minutes ago is still in the way. She scoots us over to Arastradero and Hillview Avenue in the research park and turns the car around to face southeast. We can see brighter lights in the southeast sky. Still no sun. Still time.
 
6:40. Julie takes us down Arastradero, across Foothill, and past Gunn High School. I ask about the Baylands. She tells me it takes her 15 minutes to get there from home on a normal day and sunrise is at 6:53.
 
We probably won’t make it. But although I’ve just about given up and work to persuade Julie to take us home, I agree that we might as well try. The Julie-Jeep unit has the bit between its teeth and was soon streaming along on Rt. 101 with virtually no traffic. Quick off the exit at East Bayshore, she zeroes in on Byxbee Park at the Baylands. We pull into the parking lot by the bathrooms. It is 6:55, two minutes past the official time of sunrise. It seems it’s happened, we’ve missed it. But we still don’t see it! We scramble out of the Jeep … and don’t you know it … between us and the southeast Bay there’s another dang-blasted hill! Julie says urgently that if we walk up it, we might see sunrise. That the mission is still alive feels extraordinary … as if the sunrise is urging us on. But on top of the fact that I am in my nightie with sweatpants and a sweatshirt on top, I am wearing slippers. It’s a grassy hill. Julie puts herself behind me with her steady hand on my back and helps push me upward. We are almost at the top when I hear her say quietly, “Oh Mom you can’t see it, you’re too short.” But with dogged determination and Julie’s helping hand I get to the crest just as the sun’s golden rim peeks out from behind the distant East Bay hills.
 
As we stand rooted to the ground, the golden globe, the sun, moves upward unbelievably quickly, coming into full view. No one else is in sight. The sun is bathing us, in light that seems tangible. Within seconds it is too bright to look at. I can’t believe that in eighty-one, almost eighty-two years this is the first time I have witnessed sunrise.
 
The sight, the gift, the reward, the perfection of being in time and space suffuses my whole being, as I stand there with my daughter, whose arms are holding me close, who was intent on making, and had made, this unbelievable vision happen. It was like the sun waited for us. Julie took a photo of it. I think as proof that it happened. 

My mom is right. I took that photo as proof that we'd finally found the sunrise that November morning. I also took it so that, as she approaches her eighty-second birthday, she'd have another photo to hang on her family wall that documents how much we mean to one another. Here, Simon & Garfunkle come to mind:

"Long ago . . . it must be . . .
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They're all that's left you"

-Old Friends
 
For a whole month, Mom and I are in cahoots about our Solstice Sunrise Surprise. Neither of us is known for being good at keeping secrets :) yet neither of us wants to spoil the surprise we have in mind. We make a few trips back to the Baylands to time the whole thing: when to arrive, how long it takes to share Mom’s story, and the length of time it takes to walk up the hill. The sunrise will be at 7:19 on the Solstice. The day before the Solstice, I ask Dan, Sawyer, Avery to be bundled up and ready to leave the house at 6:45 am the next morning. I do not tell them why.

They are in the car by 6:50am. It's fine, I've built in extra time. But the temperature is 34 degrees, and while the four of them are in the Jeep whose engine is only beginning to warm, I am scraping ice off the windshield. An unexpected delay. But before long we're off to the Baylands. Avery and Sawyer make guesses about where we are headed. In the playfulness of their voices and questions I can hear a willingness to go along with whatever is going on, and I smile inside at these children – these gifts from the Universe and God and whomever else runs the show. I check my watch. Do the math counting back from sunrise. We're still okay.

We arrive at the Baylands and pull into the small gravel parking lot. Everyone tightens up their coats, scarves, hats, masks, and gloves as I open the trunk and pull hot drinks, blankets, and cookies from the back. I point to a small sitting area in the direction of the hill and everyone ambles toward it. It takes a few moments to settle everyone for the reading. Mom's story takes twelve minutes. We're still okay. We sit on cold stone benches. Mom is in the center, flanked by her grandchildren. Dan and I are on a second bench facing them, our knees almost meeting theirs in the center. We form a cocoon of family against the chill of the morning. But it's not enough. Sawyer gets up to adjust the large hooded blanket wrapped around him. It’s 7:09. We’re cutting it close. Mom begins to read her story aloud. Dan and the kids are enjoying the tale. I check my phone surreptitiously a few more times. Sunrise is at 7:19. Mom finishes reading at 7:21. Perfect. I tell everyone that it’s time. Gently but urgently I lead the five of us toward the hill. We walk up the grassy bank, kids in the lead, me next, and Dan helping my mom to the top. The distant mountains look like burning embers in a fire. The sun is coming. After all this effort I hope it works. I look back at Mom and Dan. Will they make it? I smile and wave my hands and my spirit wills them to go as fast as they can. As Mom crests the hill, the tiny sliver of mandarin orange peeks from behind the distant mountains and begins to grow. The five of us stand there, pointing. Exclaiming at the sun. Within seconds it is blinding, and we have to look away.

We can see our breath when we talk. We take in the 360 degree view.  I’m grateful I have kids who will go with the flow and let their mom try to make meaning out of a car ride, a small hill, and a sunrise. Now it’s time for me to give my own mom the framed copy of the photo I took a month ago on this same hill. She tears up. She loves being in on the big surprise for the family and also a recipient of an unexpected gift. We drink the hot chocolate and the coffee and eat some cookies. I talk about the solstice: the old year, the diminished light, the promise of increasing sun, the possibility of being optimistic about the days and months and year to come. I point out how low the sun’s arc is at this time of year and how with every coming day the arc will lengthen. Dan points out the distinctive way the sun lights things when it is low in the sky. Mom and the kids talks about what the sun is like at the North and South poles. We wave hello to the few others out at dawn on this chilly morning. Sawyer begins to gather his cloak like he’s a vampire. Or royalty. Avery lies down on a blanket huddled under another blanket for warmth and smiles and mouths 'thank you.' Sawyer announces that a flock of geese are flying up the hill, fast approaching. The geese do a fly-by so near to our heads that we flinch. Dan makes a Top Gun reference and all of a sudden the geese become Tom Cruise. We take more photos. We look at our watches. It’s a Monday. It’s time to head home. But we walk slowly and chat and laugh. No one is eager for this to be over. Certainly not me.

I haven’t felt what we might call 'childlike wonder and awe' in quite some time. But in watching this sun greet me not once but twice on this small hill, I got clear that the things I may have taken for granted – like the sun rise, and like the fun we can have just being a family – can offer great comfort in these disquieting times if I simply make a bit of an effort.
 
This letter is called "Show Your People That They Matter," and hey, you're one of my people. I'm hoping you enjoyed this little glimpse into Lythcott-Haims Land. Tell me how you and yours are making meaningful memories from old and new experiences this holiday season. Tell me how you're trying to help others feel more thought of, seen, and loved. May you have a Happy, Merry and Wondrous Everything, and I'll see you in 2021!!
 
xo

Bonus pics of: Sawyer (21) in his cloak. Avery (19) getting warm however she can. And our five shadows as we returned to our car and the day began.