At the beginning of the month I set out to see past the commercialization of Christmas, past the insanity of Christmas shopping, the bombardment of Christmas advertisements, the glut of Duck Dynasty merchandise, the $30 Elf on the somebody else’s shelf and the siege of angry holiday traffic.
I didn’t have to look too far to see beyond the racket. Everything I needed to see was “invisible to the eye,” as my favorite children’s book author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry so eloquently articulated in The Little Prince.
{“Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.” In English this means, “One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”}
At the start of the month when I posted a storytelling contest I had no idea this one would come my way. As the author of this wacky blog, I expected to receive wacky stories ripe with sarcasm. I expected at least one reference to the Griswold family and one reference to the frozen flag pole in A Christmas Story.
Instead I got a story that began with a phone call at the end of November from a young woman in Kentucky named Ali. She wanted to know if I was available the week after Thanksgiving to take photos of she and her 20-month-old son. They would be on vacation for a week on Longboat Key. She wanted beach photos of just the two of them.
“Nothing extravagant,” she said. “Just an hour or so of me and him doing our thing.”
She seemed a little scattered, a little distant. As a journalist, I wanted to know more. As a photographer, it was none of my business. Were these Christmas portraits? Your basic mom/son portraits? She didn’t say.
I penciled her in for a Saturday just before sunset, which was how we got on the subject of lighting sky lanterns.
