Santa spends a lot of time in a box. With glass ornaments wrapped in last year's newspapers cushioning his hefty ceramic ass, he waits.

We roused him in September and yanked his nest of wire lighting, tinsel, painted snowmen, and half-burnt candles from the closet, then took a heavy carpenter's claw to the woodwork and drywall. Santa's hiding place was exposed to daylight when Jerry ripped and tore away our roof and tossed it in the backyard.

Opposite Santa in that closet was my flimsy treasure. Finally succumbing to changes this year was a balsa wood dollhouse that my father had glued together and stained a light brown one Christmas Eve as I slept -- still firmly aware that my eyes had better be screwed shut until Santa snuck in like a sliver and inflated with gifts and toys and jolly old abundance there in the living room, just like a movie.

On Christmas day I remember the dollhouse's fresh wood scent and series of rooms, loving it, and loving the fantasies that twirled from my mind like fluttering ribbons. The house moved when the family moved from one town to another. It had its place in the loft bedroom at my parents' house until I moved it again. Down a ladder I went with my left hand gripping a cumbersome living room, and a cluttered kitchen in my right. I had a whole world swirling around that dollhouse. As my fantasies and I grew up, I began to decorate that house with photographs of boyfriends, jewelry that arrived wrapped in crinkly, pink cellophane, or with ceramic vases or mugs I had thrown on the wheel in ceramics class.

The dollhouse: It came with me to my apartment, and moved a last time to our little house in the woods in Newtown. After Jerry's daughter traded her playtime in front of its open rooms for magazines, the telephone, and the Internet, the dollhouse was pushed inside a closet.

Are we going to throw that out, Jerry asked occasionally?

My father made it for me, I would answer.

We had the conversation a few times.

Sadly, when the roof came off and we stood in the open with broken walls and splintered wood all around us, I faced the dollhouse.

What are we going to do with this, Jerry asked?

For a week or two it slid from one corner to another as Jerry worked at demolishing, then rebuilding an upstairs room.

After an hour or two of cleaning one weekend, Jerry asked, can we throw it out now?

With lots of resolve and eyes squinting against sunlight, I heaved the poor thing toward the ground where it crashed apart, but I saved some furniture.

Thank you Dad, for my dollhouse and everything else.

This year my parents and Jerry helped me rescue a dog, and for that I will have a merry Christmas.

Last year we could not know for certain that Lily would be here this year, full of warm breath, life, and an eagerness to rush into her day, find a ball or a stick, and lock her jaws on it. On December 26 of last year she arrived. Just five days away.