From the Ice Hall of Ded Moroz

My dearest Emma,

My granddaughter reads the letters and I sign them, which is a fair division of labor given that she is quicker than I am and I am several centuries old. She read yours out to me last night by the stove and I asked her to read it twice: EMMA.

I do not come at Christmas. I come at the turn of the year, when the old one is finished and the new one has not started, in that strange quiet hour when everybody is awake at midnight and nobody is quite sure what to do with themselves. That is my hour. It always has been.

Here is what I know about that hour, Emma, and I have stood in a great many of them. The year that is ending does not take anything away from you. Everything you learned, you keep. You walk into the new one carrying all of it. Nobody is ever starting from nothing.

She keeps better notes than I do. She is right about most things and I have stopped arguing.

Until the snow goes,
with a cold hand and a warm heart —

Ded Moroz

Grandfather Frost · with Snegurochka

P.S. — If the window frost makes a pattern like ferns in the morning, that is me leaning on the glass while she reads. I am not as careful as I used to be.