If you need more proof that Christmas is here than the bright lights flickering from your neighbor’s windows or the tinsel snowmen, Santas, and angels appearing on lampposts downtown, then just look at the calendar.

We have only about 20 days until jolly ole Saint Nicholas comes down the chimney.

It occurs to me that I don’t have a chimney, a minor technicality, I hope.

I love this time of year for the nostalgic feelings of Christmas past it conjures up in my heart and mind. Mama and I would bundle up in our warm coats and gloves, walking the yard making sure baby Jesus’s lightbulb was glowing bright in the nativity scene. We drank hot chocolate while climbing the ladder hanging strands of old-fashioned colored lights from the rooftop of our stone house on Dykes Chapel Road. Daddy would open the door in his pajamas just long enough to shoo us inside, out of the cold, he would say, and out of our minds he imagined.

Once we had the exterior of our porch adorned with evergreen wreaths, giant candy canes lining the sidewalk, toy soldiers standing at attention by the front door, and the wise men assembled near the manger, we would light it all up with some of Daddy’s heavy duty extension cords. Our favorite thing was to drive the family car up and down that little dark road of my childhood, making circles through the church yard named after Mama’s family, creeping slowly by the festive yard display, year after year. We turned up Bing Crosby, hit defrost for the windshield, and made dozens of drive-by tours, all while giggling and singing to the top of our lungs to classic Christmas carols — like Bing really needed our help.

As I pull out strings of colored lights, the animated Santa and Mrs. Claus, and the angel that once sat on the very tip top of our tree, my heart sings, and cries a little, remembering Mama’s laugh, Daddy’s smile, those special times wrapped up in tinsel, bows and garlands. In my grown-up years, Mama waited for me to make the three-hour drive home so that she and I could open up boxes from the attic. Just like that, we traveled back in time to all the wondrous moments when everything seemed right in the world, or at least in our neck of the woods. She crunched on peppermint candy canes and drank her hot chocolate with tiny marshmallows from the Santa mugs she made herself in ceramics class years before.

Yesterday I bought two Santa mugs, and although they are not the same ones we drank from by the popping fire while we took breaks from spreading silver tinsel on the tree, they remind me of my Christmas angel. I will be going home this holiday season, and maybe I will drive by the old home place, remembering it as it once was.

Perhaps while leaving some cookies for Santa I will also leave some candy canes for Mama and Daddy, but the memories they leave with me are the sweetest of gifts.

David Creel is a Mississippi native and writes a syndicated column. You may reach him at beautifulwithdavid@gmail.com.