Who in this house helped me keep going toward something I wanted?
Who kept my hope alive this year?
Generosity gave the tree its first layer, and this week adds a second one: hope. A good gift equips a person for a journey, and hope is what decides whether the road is worth taking. For the next seven days, we look at what it means to keep wanting a good thing when nobody can promise how it ends, and at the people who kept walking beside us while we waited.
December 8 to 10: Saturate. These three days are for receiving, one circle each: the people in your house (Core) on December 8, the people within your reach (Community) on December 9, and the good that comes from beyond anyone's grip (Cosmos) on December 10. Each day ends with an ornament.
December 11: Celebrate. The second candle is lit from the first, and everyone reads the gold ornaments with their own name on them.
December 12 to 14: Participate. These three days are for giving hope, one currency at a time: time on December 12, resources on December 13, and words on December 14.
Every daily reading has the same three parts: a picture for the heart, a point for the head, and a practice for the hands. On the giving days, the picture is a story, then a song, then a scene from a film.
This story is made up, but most of us have met someone like her. A climber has wanted one mountain for most of her adult life. She keeps a photo of its summit taped inside a kitchen cabinet, so she sees it every morning when she reaches for a mug. She spends two years training and saving, and then she flies halfway around the world to try.
On summit day she leaves the high camp at two in the morning with her headlamp on. By ten she can see the top, close enough that she could almost count the rocks on it. Then the wind picks up, and a gray wall of cloud starts rolling over the ridge. Her guide looks at the sky, looks at his watch, and shakes his head. She stands there for a long minute, and then she turns around. Going on might have gotten her to the summit, but it might also have cost her life.
Months later she's back at home, a little older and a lot poorer. The mountain doesn't owe her anything, and she knows the odds haven't improved. Still, the photo is in the cabinet, and most mornings before work she's out on the stairs of a high school stadium with a pack full of water jugs on her back, climbing up and walking down, over and over. Nobody can tell her yet whether the next try will work. She hasn't stopped walking.
On December 11, your family lights the second of five candles from the first one, and hope gets added to the answer when the candle words ask, "What do we pass on?" This week is about the people who kept walking with you.
The climber is a picture of hope, and hope is easy to blur with two other things.
The first is expectation. Back in November, the Impairment chapter took a trip to Costco to show the difference between "should" and "could." Walk in sure there will be samples, and you're disappointed when there aren't. Walk in thinking there might be, and you're open either way. Expectation lives on the "will" side, and hope lives on the "might" side. We expect the sun to come up tomorrow, so it takes no hope at all. Hope only lives where the good might not happen, and where you have a part to play. It can still be sure of who it trusts. A person can trust someone completely and still not know how or when the good will come.
The second thing hope gets mixed up with is a wish. "I wish it would snow on Christmas" is a real want, but nothing is being asked of you. A wish is a want that sits still. Hope is a want that walks. It trains on the stadium stairs, fills out one more application, and shows up for one more appointment.
Sometimes the walking is waiting. When a friend is in surgery, a marriage is going through a hard season, or a child is struggling, there may be nothing to fix. Waiting well still takes work. It means staying close, staying reachable, and refusing to decide the story is over before it is.
The climber turned around on the mountain, but she never gave up on it. The walking is what kept her hope alive, and most of us had someone this year who did some of that walking with us.
Who in your house kept walking with you toward something that might not have happened?
Today the second green layer of the Giving Tree goes up, a little narrower than the first, taped just above it (the Pivot has the details). Then come the gold ornaments.
Cut a gold or yellow paper circle for each person in your house other than you.
On the front, write the person's name.
On the back, thank them for a time this year when they kept going with you toward something that might not have happened. "Thank you for running lines with me every night before the audition, even after I said I'd never get the part."
Tape it to the new layer with the writing toward the wall.
Nobody reads the backs yet. They wait for the second candle on December 11.
Kids' story: read "A Rope for Mr. Moose" from The Overflow Adventure in Wanderful Woods together.
Time: 15 to 20 minutes, plus about five to put up the layer.
With kids: ask, "What's something you really wanted this year that you had to wait for? Did you do anything while you waited?" A child can draw the thing they hoped for on the back of the ornament and tell you who helped them wait.
If you live alone: use the choice you made for line 6 of your plan in Prepare.
Hello, my wonderful story friends! Last time, the whole woods told Daddy Monkey what they see in him, and he tucked their words safe in the bottom of his tool bag. Now a new week begins, and Mr. Moose can’t stop looking up at the very top of Everest’s cliff.
Is there something you want so much that you’d walk a long, long way to get it? Let’s go see what Mr. Moose wants.
The sun came up pink over Wanderful Woods. It touched the very top of Everest’s high gray cliff first, before it touched anything else, so for a few minutes the top of the cliff glowed like a candle while the rest of the woods was still blue and asleep.
Mr. Moose stood by his door, next to the little green pine, and watched it.
“Mr. Monkey,” he said. “I want to take the lantern up there.”
Mr. Monkey looked at the little squash lantern on the Wishing Tree. Then he looked at the cliff. It was very far away. And very, very high.
“All the way to the top?”
“All the way to the top,” said Mr. Moose. “Everest lives up there by himself. It’s cold, and it’s dark, and it’s the highest place in the whole woods. He came all the way down to walk us home. I want to bring him some light.”
Mr. Monkey’s eyes went big. “Then let’s go! Right now!”
Bruno was walking by with his breakfast. He stopped. “What does Mr. Moose have?”
“A big hope,” said Mr. Monkey.
Bruno’s ears shot up. “A big ROPE? I have a big rope!”
And before anybody could say anything, he ran off to his den and came back with the biggest coil of rope anybody had ever seen. It was so big he had to wear it, around and around his middle, like a giant doughnut.
“For your rope,” said Bruno proudly, and he unwound it and wound it right around Mr. Moose instead.
Mr. Moose stood there in a big lumpy rope coat. “Thank you, Bruno.”
“Haw haw haw!” went Bruno. “Now you have two ropes.”
So off they went, Mr. Moose in his rope coat, Mr. Monkey hopping ahead, toward the big hill at the bottom of Lookout Ledge.
The hill was steep. It was covered in ice from the cold night, smooth and shiny. Mr. Monkey scampered right up it on his hands and feet and tail. Mr. Moose put one hoof on the ice. Then another.
Then his long legs went four different ways, and he slid all the way back down to the bottom on his tummy, shhhhhhhhwoop, spinning around once at the end.
He got up. He tried again. Shhhhhhhhwoop. Back to the bottom.
He tried a third time. Shhhhhhhhwoop.
“Mr. Moose,” called Mr. Monkey from the top of the hill. “You’re a sled!”
“Hee hee hee!” went Mr. Monkey.
“Ha-ha-ha,” laughed Mr. Moose, lying flat at the bottom with his rope coat all tangled. But it was a small laugh. And then he just lay there.
Mr. Monkey slid back down to him. “Mr. Moose?”
“I can’t even get up the first hill,” said Mr. Moose quietly. He looked up at the cliff, so far away above them. “How am I going to get all the way up there?”
He sat up in the snow. “I wish I could fly,” he said. “Like Everest.”
Mr. Monkey hated seeing Mr. Moose sad. And he wanted to help so badly that an idea popped right out of him.
“Then you’ll FLY!”
He ran and found two big, bushy pine branches and tied one on each side of Mr. Moose with Bruno’s rope. “Wings! Now flap!”
Mr. Moose flapped. The pine branches swished. Snow flew everywhere. Pine needles flew everywhere. Mr. Moose flapped and flapped until he was puffing, and he didn’t go up even a little bit. All he did was blow a big pile of snow right onto Mr. Monkey.
Mr. Monkey popped up out of the pile with pine needles sticking out all over him, like a little porcupine. “Hee hee hee! You flew the SNOW!”
“Ha-ha-ha,” laughed Mr. Moose, a real laugh this time. Then he stopped flapping and looked down at his pine-branch wings. “Moose can’t fly, Mr. Monkey.”
“I know,” said Mr. Monkey. “But you looked so sad.”
Mr. Moose sat down in the snow and thought. He thought about wishing. Wishing he could fly was just sitting here, flapping, going nowhere. He could wish all day long, and the cliff would still be just as far away.
If he really wanted to get up there, he couldn’t just want it. He had to start walking. Even if it was a little walk. Even if it was the bottom of the littlest hill.
“A wish just sits there,” he said slowly. “I want mine to walk.”
“How?” asked Mr. Monkey.
“I practice,” said Mr. Moose. “Starting with a little hill.”
And from behind them, a deep voice said, “I know a little hill.”
It was Daddy Moose. He’d come out to fetch firewood, and he’d seen the whole thing: the sliding, the flapping, the snow. He untied the pine-branch wings, very carefully, and set them aside. He left Bruno’s rope on.
“Behind our maple,” said Daddy Moose. “It’s small. It isn’t icy. And I’ll walk it with you.”
The little hill behind the big maple wasn’t very big at all. Mr. Monkey could have jumped over half of it. But Mr. Moose walked up it, one hoof at a time, with Daddy Moose walking right beside him, and he walked down. Then he walked up again. Then down again.
Daddy Moose filled a little sack with pinecones and tied it to Mr. Moose’s back with Bruno’s rope. “Up there,” he said, “you’ll be carrying the lantern. So now, you carry these.”
Mr. Moose carried the pinecones up the little hill and down. Mr. Monkey carried a sack of pinecones too, just so Mr. Moose wouldn’t be carrying his alone.
On the fifth time up, Mr. Moose’s antlers caught on a low branch. He kept walking. The branch bent, and bent, and bent, and then it let go, THWANGGG, and dumped a whole branch-full of snow right down the back of his neck.
“OOOOH, COLD,” said Mr. Moose, and his whole body shivered from his ears to his tail.
“Ha-ha-ha!” laughed Daddy Moose. Mr. Monkey had never heard Daddy Moose laugh out loud before. It sounded like a big drum.
Up the little hill. Down the little hill. All morning. All afternoon. Daddy Moose never hurried him and never told him how to do it. He just walked beside him, every time, steady as a tree.
By the time the sun was going down, Mr. Moose walked up the little hill and down again ten times in a row without slipping once, with his sack of pinecones on his back.
He was still very far from the top of Everest’s cliff. But he wasn’t sitting anymore.
That night, by the little green pine, Mama Moose brought out the gold paint again. “In this house,” she said, “who helped you keep going toward something you wanted?”
Mr. Moose painted a gold circle for Daddy Moose. On the back, he painted a little hill, and a little moose walking up it with a sack on his back, and a big moose walking right beside him. Then, way up in the corner, very small, he painted the top of a cliff, glowing pink.
Mr. Monkey painted one for Mama Monkey, for the whole spring she’d spent in the river with him while he learned to swim, holding him up under his tummy every morning until he could paddle all by himself.
They hung them on the little pine with the painted side to the trunk.
“What a day!” said Mr. Monkey. “Bruno thought Mr. Moose had a rope, so he brought him one. Mr. Moose slid down the icy hill three times like a sled. I made him pine-branch wings, and he flew the snow onto me. A branch dumped snow down his neck, and Daddy Moose laughed like a drum. And Mr. Moose walked up the little hill ten times.”
Mr. Monkey whistled, and Mr. Moose hummed, and together they sang:
We are better together,
Moose and Monkey forever.
And far away, as the sun went down, the very top of Everest’s cliff glowed pink one more time, the last thing in all of Wanderful Woods to let go of the light.