Looking again for The Christmas Moment

I close myself off to Christmas at Halloween. I refuse to accept the season at a time of ghosts and goblins. I hate that retailers are forcing the season on the public ever earlier. Pretty soon, the first Christmas sales will start to accompany Back to School sales.

I don't start to open myself up to the notion of Christmas until the first of December. And then it's normally a gradual process of getting into the spirit.

Part of the process is what I've come to call my Christmas Moment.

It's when I know I'm in the zone and zen of Christmas. It has nothing to do with shopping, it has nothing to do with the frenzy, it has everything to do with the feeling about Christmas.

Normally it's associated with music, and usually it occurs late in the season, like at church on Christmas Eve.

Trouble is ... I might have already had my moment in the most unlikely of places, the gym.

I was in the middle of adjusting a Nautilaus weight machine when I heard Paul Potts come through the headphones of my iPod singing, "O, Holy Night."

Now, I have relatively few Christmas songs among the 1,500 or so I have stored on my iPod. And a Christmas song very rarely comes on when I have the iPod set to randomly play music when I work work out at the gym.

So the fact that I heard a Christmas song on my iPod was unusual. The fact that it would be "O, Holy Night" -- one of my Christmas favorites -- was also unusual.

And I did get that wash of reflective satisfaction come over me as I listened to Potts sing. Potts, you see, isn't very well known as a singer. He was a winner of the United Kingdom version of "American Idol" a couple of years back. He was a nobody selling cell phones, won the competition and started recording albums of classical music -- a great story of the everyman who finds a way to rise above his ordinariness.

At any rate, I figure the Moment has to count. How could it not? It met all the qualifications I impose upon it every year.

But I've judged that it was too easy.

So I'm on the search for Moment II. I'm looking for a Moment double dip.

And I think it'll be pretty easy to find because my very large, very boisterous family is supposed to coalesce at my mother's.

And that's a Moment, let me tell you, several in fact.