Christmas Eve when birds tremble at the sight of flying reindeer.

From Alfred’s journal

December 24th, cold enough that the gutter ice held my weight. A boy in the blue house across the street had taped a paper reindeer to his window, the kind with the legs bent to look like running, and every time the furnace kicked on the paper shivered and the thing appeared to move. I watched it for most of an hour from the maple. For years I thought the flying was the strange part of that story, the part a bird would have opinions about; it is not, the strange part is that the whole sky belongs to somebody else one night a year. Christmas Eve when birds tremble at the sight of flying reindeer. Switch came by with half a walnut and said he liked the sleigh best, the loudness of it, and I did not tell him what I had been thinking because I was not finished thinking it.