Walking through my neighborhood the other day, I noticed how many of us have already decorated our houses this year. We’ve put up the Christmas lights, dragged the tree out of the basement and tacked up the wreath, calendars be damned.

It brought a tear to my eye, the indomitable cheer did, reminding me of my son’s first Christmas present, the one I bought him before he was born, before he was conceived, actually, when he was nothing more than a tender shoot of hope blooming in my soul.

We’d been Trying (with a capital T) to have children for years, and Trying had made way for Increasingly More Invasive Ways of Trying, with nothing but failures and miscarriages dotting the landscape thus far.

Then one holiday season, I found myself in Colorado, about a half-mile from our IVF clinic, in a hotel waiting for my eggs to ripen enough to harvest. My husband was back in Chicago and though I worked remotely on the weekdays, I was otherwise aimless and lonely. I decided one weekend to take a day trip to The Stanley Hotel, the inspiration for Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel in “The Shining,” an appropriately grim pilgrimage.

I drove my rented car into the Rocky Mountains on a gray Saturday afternoon, stopping halfway up to let a caravan of elk cross the highway in front of me. Once there, I walked the hotel’s grounds, snapping pictures to text to my husband, as if to say, “See how much fun I’m having?”

Eventually, I wandered into the gift shop, decorated richly for Christmas with evergreen boughs and white lights. To that point, I’d stayed far away from any purchases that might hint at even the loosest belief that I would one day have a child. There were no tiny clothes, no baby books or cribs in our house. Our second bedroom prominently featured a giant easel and my acrylic paint set.

“I’m not living as if this is a baby’s room,” I’d say.

So it was with some trepidation, and a fair amount of shame, that I approached the kids’ section of The Stanley Hotel’s store.

I ran my hand along the wooden trains, holiday clothes and alighted on a small stuffed dog. I picked it up, felt its soft cotton ears and knitted body. I turned over the price tag and winced. An absurd amount, I thought, for such a tiny toy, one only large enough to fit a newborn’s arms. I put it back.

I picked out fridge magnets and Christmas tree ornaments, a T-shirt I thought my husband would like. I kept looking over, though, at the stuffed dog. I tentatively picked it up again, and again tsked at the price. Some nameless force, though, kept it in my hand.

I checked out, paid for it all and drove back to the hotel. I told no one, even my husband when he arrived in Denver. I pushed the toy into the bottom of my suitcase like a secret and took it home.

When I unpacked my bags, I took the stuffed dog out of its plastic bag. Without deciding to, and without understanding why, I wrapped it in thick, cream-colored wrapping paper decorated with holly. Around the outside of the package, I tied a red-and-gold ribbon. I made a tiny card, one you’d have to open to read, and inside wrote, in black lettering, “To Baby, from Mom and Dad.”

Reading the words made me sick with pity for the person who’d written them, for it was obviously not me. To claim the name “Mom” would have been delusional, and who was this nonexistent Baby, anyway? I wasn’t even pregnant, and there was no sign on the horizon of getting to that stage, itself no guarantee of parenthood, as I had learned through hard lessons.

Filled with shame, I tucked the wrapped present away in The Stanley Hotel plastic bag, and stuffed it deep in a shopping bag full of wrapping paper, one I shoved to the back of a knee wall cubbyhole.

I still didn’t tell my husband, knew he would give me a sad look, one that I would have sorely earned, one that would have asked, “You’re buying gifts for a baby we don’t have?”

I ignored the present that Christmas, pretended to forget it even existed. When I took the bag of wrapping paper out the following Christmas, I was nearly two-thirds of the way through a terrifying, endangered pregnancy. I felt no more confident than I had the previous Christmas. Then, I truly did forget about the present, for almost a year, in the bustle of freshly minted parenthood and Christmas planning and showing off our baby at family holiday parties.

I found the present when digging for gift labels. My hand closed around the soft package, then I pulled it out and gasped. I still didn’t feel like that woman, Mom, on the label, but the boy cooing softly in the bassinet beside me proved me wrong. I was her. He was Baby. We were parents.

I realized then that the force that had compelled me to buy the stuffed dog, the same one since gnawed by the merciless gums of not one but two babies, was nothing more than hope.

Hope that refused to be shamed out of existence, hope that kept me returning to that clinic in Colorado, kept me jabbing myself with shots of hormones and kept me trekking through even much lower valleys, all for slim but powerful hope.

Now it’s holiday season again, and I see the evidence of our collective hope around me. In the lights on our houses, the ones put up extra early this year, and the twinkle from the ornaments on our Christmas trees, there’s that hope again.

We hope for hugs from grandmothers, time with our grandchildren, the return of our jobs, the reopening of our businesses. We hope that 2021 brings a reprieve from fear, from illness, from pain.

So, my hope for all of us is that we celebrate thoroughly this year, whatever we choose to celebrate, whether it be Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or Winter Solstice or just the weary end of a very long year. Decorate. Bake the cookies, watch the movies, drink the eggnog. Buy the present.

Cover yourself in hope, this holiday season.

Take it from me: It will, some day, bring you the most amazing gifts.