Last night was Tuesday, but since we celebrated Christmas early with my brother’s family, I pushed my blog off a day. Instead, I’m typing in the car with Tony at the wheel and Cali gaming on her Nintendo Switch behind us, southbound to Savannah, Georgia, where temperatures in the seventies await.

Our trunk overflows with boxes wrapped in ribbons and bows. The three-foot artificial fir tree my roommate and I had in our college dorm room decades ago is packed there too, along with lights and stockings and stuffers. Mom always says the Hampton Inn is their home away from home, and so it will be ours this holiday when we open presents in our hotel room.

A Different Dawn

We were on the road by four o’clock this morning. After convincing my husband to make a short stop on our road trip, I got to watch the sun rise over the Tar River from a bridge in Stith-Talbert Park. I missed my pier, but there was a constant cacophony of birds, and I enjoyed their different songs from the typical gulls and crows at my sunrise spot back in Virginia.

That pier is where I first met Billy, riding a tractor raking the beach while I was journaling through the pre-sunrise last spring. “Santa caught you being good!” said this jolly old man with white whiskers and what would turn out to be a bowl full of jelly beneath his work clothes. He told me to call him Santa Billy and invited me to visit him at the Christmas Market in Colonial Williamsburg this year. The invite came with a red coin etched with the word “Believe” in fancy, scrolling print.

It’s been a month or so since he’d needed to tend the beach in the mornings, but occasionally we’ve swapped sunrise snaps just to check in.

Santa Billy’s Secret

Well, I finally got to see Santa Billy in full dress in Colonial Williamsburg’s on Sunday, just a few days before Christmas, the last day of the market. We got our pictures taken with him, and this time, I gave Santa Billy a gift. Honestly, he didn’t recognize me at first—without my Bills hoodie or my beach chair, I was out of place.

Then he saw the “Ho Ho Ho” satchel at my side. It once contained a red thermos with the same scrolling “Believe” logo etched into it, gifted to me by Santa Billy over the summer. I watched him register the satchel, and then a huge grin took over his face. He hugged me tighter, greeted Tony, and introduced himself to Calista. From the Christmas satchel, I pulled out a gift from me to my friend, complete with an ornament tag featuring a classic Thomas Kinkade-style Santa Claus bearing the word “Believe.”

Believe what? Believe in Santa? Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Billy’s getting at.

The Real Message

When I read the scrolling text on my red coin and my red thermos, I see an invitation to savor the true message of hope, healing, and wholeness the material world hides this season. Behind the twinkling lights, there’s a Savior. He sees us when we’re sleeping and when we’re awake, and because we could never just be good for goodness’ sake, Christ gave the gift of His life.

Christmas season brings us together. We celebrate with family, fun, food, and fellowship. It’s the only month that comes with its own separate soundtrack—carols and hymns abound. We sing of a baby born to a virgin, wrapped in swaddling clothes, laid in a manger. We hear of “Immanuel,” God with us, and reenact the nativity scene, depicting Jesus at His most vulnerable. Fully God and fully man. The only one without sin, the only one deserving of a Christmas gift by Santa’s rules.

But here’s what Santa Billy knows, what that red coin really means: we don’t have to be good enough. We just have to believe.

The Third Door

As Tony drives us toward Savannah, I think about the three doors I faced just weeks ago. Where to spend Christmas. Syracuse, with its complicated invitation and childhood memories. Home, where we’d proven we could make our own magic. Or Savannah—neutral territory, no one’s expectations to meet or disappoint.

We chose door number three.

Not because we were running from something, but because sometimes the best way to see Christmas clearly is to step outside everyone else’s frame. My three-foot dorm room tree isn’t my mother’s perfectly decorated Fraser fir. Our Hampton Inn won’t smell like cinnamon sticks simmering on the stove. However, maybe that’s exactly what we need—Christmas stripped down to its essence.

Believe in the Sunrise

Billy and I met at sunrise, that liminal space where night becomes day. He was tending the beach; I was tending my soul. Two strangers who became friends because we both show up early to do our work—his with a tractor, mine with a journal.

That’s what “Believe” really means, isn’t it? Not in Santa, not in being good enough, but in showing up. In the sunrise that comes even when you’re miles from your regular pier. In the friendship that forms between a beach maintenance man and a woman wrestling with words. In choosing Savannah when Syracuse hurts too much. In a baby born in a barn because there was no room at the inn.

The Gift We’re Given

Tomorrow morning, Christmas Day, I’ll wake early in Savannah and find somewhere to watch the sun rise. It won’t be my pier. Cali will probably still be sleeping. But Billy will be somewhere watching the same sun rise, maybe thinking of the woman he calls “Sunrise Girl.”

We’ll open presents in a hotel room, my ancient dorm tree twinkling in the corner. It won’t look like the Christmases of my childhood or the ones I tried so hard to recreate. But it will be ours. And somewhere in the unwrapping and the laughter, in the unfamiliar sunrise and the seventy-degree weather, I’ll remember what Billy’s coin really says:

Believe that God shows up in the unexpected places—in Savannah hotels and Tar River bridges, in beach tractors and red thermoses, in a manger because every room was full.

Believe that sometimes the best gift is choosing the third door, the one that leads somewhere you’ve never been.

Believe that Christmas isn’t about recreating the past but receiving the present.

The sun will rise tomorrow over Savannah, and I’ll be there to meet it, coin in pocket, believing in the One who made the sun rise.