When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 

For now we see through a glass, darkly

But as the power of Christmas eve approaches I can still, after all these years, enter exactly the same imaginative landscape that welcomed me as an only child. In this small corner of our house the door has been reopened for me.

I smile contentedly. I feel so alive in the most dreamlike of ways.

I am their friend, and we are off an adventure again. We three.

Long may it continue. The other side of the dream is sad enough.