Some years, Christmas just won’t arrive.

You perform all the “correct” actions to usher in the season. You go to church, you drive downtown to see the lights, you write out Christmas cards, you bake the cookies.

If anyone looked in your windows and saw you, perched there by the fire, they would see what looked an awful lot like Christmas.

But you, in your empty heart, would know better.

Where are you, Spirit of Christmas?

This gnawing absence of feeling came over me one Christmas. My sons were younger, and I had planned a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, to see the paintings and expose my active boys (and my husband, for that matter) to fine art — and, I hoped, beckon Christmas closer through culture.

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Instead, we squabbled on the way out of the museum, and all the way into the cold, wintry street. No wreath or candle or brightly lit tree could cheer us, or interrupt our bickering, or allow us to see ourselves from afar — the way God must see us, sometimes.

Trudging along, I looked up. An older couple, holding tightly to one another, was making their way toward us. They walked quickly, heads down, bodies angled in toward one another. It was if they had become accustomed to, a long time ago, being alone.

As they came closer, I could see the man’s face was greatly deformed, his features badly misshapen, his skin mottled and red with cold.

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When they were almost alongside us — for that briefest of moments when souls pass on the street — a single penny dropped out of the man’s hand, and rolled into the gutter.

Related: What Christmas Really Means

My middle son, Matt, then 10, watched the coin as it rolled, and looked up at the couple, his face rosy and open, in the way that only a child’s can be. Suddenly, he leapt into the gutter, and began searching for the penny among the cigarette butts and discarded coffee cups — all the trash left behind in a big, bustling, distracted city.

We were all silent, suddenly experiencing a joy so poignant it widened our eyes and closed our mouths. My husband looked at me silently, his eyes filling, and I then sensed that the biggest, most important job in the city – and for a second, in the vast and swirling universe — was being completed before our eyes.

“Got it,” Matt cried triumphantly, and extended his small cold hand to the man, holding out the dirty penny.

“Here you go, sir,” he said kindly.

The man bent down towards my son.

“Why, thank you, son,” he said, his voice gruff, with perhaps a hint of a tear in it.

The man’s wife smiled, suddenly, so widely and happily, conveying so many things — joy, appreciation, grateful surprise.

I had found Christmas. It was there all along. But it wasn’t in the wreaths or the cards or the paintings in the art museum — as nice as all those things are.

It was in that moment when strangers met on a rather ordinary street in Boston. Strangers who were suddenly gathered around a child who dove right into the messy, the discarded and the dirty, and made something beautiful from it. Something very like strangers and shepherds gathered around a child in a manger long ago.

May you find Christmas — the real Christmas — this year.

And may you return a penny. Or have one returned to you.