It's finally Christmas, the snow softly covers the roofs and the sound of children laughing seems more distant than ever. Even though my mother died two months ago I still feel the air thicken when I walk past her painting, my father is still wearing black and the candles are still covered in black veils.

Even though the smell of gingerbread cookies comes from every house in the neighborhood, our tree is not up yet, the decorations rust in the attic and my father shuts the door to carol singers. Our friends and family tell us it’s time to move on and at least celebrate Christmas, but my father’s too stubborn and wants to keep closing up in agony.

With my sister we want to make our father a little present to cheer him up. So we climb up to the attic and go through our old boxes and we find a rusted music box that we thought would be perfect for him. We wrapped it up and brought some of the Christmas boxes down too. We decorated and made gingerbread cookies to have a nice little Christmas.

At eight o’clock we went into our father’s study to tell him about what we had planned for him, but before I could even start talking, he told us to sit down. We do and he takes two boxes from his desk and hands me the bigger one, which is as big as a jewelry box, and hands the small one to my sister. He nods his head towards the presents and we open them, my sister is faster than me so I stop opening mine to see hers better. It is a necklace with the shape of a key. She looks at me like telling me to open mine, I react and I open the blue box to reveal a beautiful snow globe that had the figure of a delicate ballerina spinning under soft snow. I tilt it up and down to see the snow fall on her hair, then I examine the rest of the snow globe and at the bottom I see a keyhole just the size of my sister’s key necklace. Before I can tell her, my father tells us that those were the Christmas presents that our mother left us. A sad smile crosses his face as he says that. A second later he reacts and asks what we wanted to tell him, so we stand up and tell him to follow us. We enter the living room with a nervous smile and we turn to see his reaction, and he’s smiling, really smiling, like how he smiled two months ago. He drops on his knees and opens his arms, we run into them and hug him tight as he whispers a sincere “Thanks.”

We sit in the living room and I show my sister the keyhole in the snow globe, she understands immediately and opens it, inside it there is nothing but dust. A little bit sad, we give our father his present, he opens it and looks up, smiles and tells me to hand him the open snow globe, he takes the mechanism out of the music box and puts it in the snow globe. He hands it back to me and I tilt it up and down and immediately a soft, soothing melody starts to play. I recognize it, it was the song my mother used to sing to me and my sister every night. I start to sing it softly as the wind howls outside and the fire crackles.

My little girls go to sleep.

My little girls close your eyes.

My little girls don’t worry anymore.

My little girls I’ll always be here.

My little girls go to sleep…