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smiles now from the television screen while he scrapes the last of his savory meat into a pie shell. As I struggle to position the top crust on this final, skimpy pie, someone off-camera suggests it should be for Uncle Bruce, who’s always first in line to get his.
    â€œHere, let me spit on it.” I wink. “I hope he’s not watching this video.” Everyone laughs and the screen goes white.
    Silence.
    It occurs to me that I hadn’t noticed a single label on the spices Dad used in the video. Yet a huge grin sweeps across my face when I realize we’d captured the secret ingredients after all.
    The secret wasn’t in the seasonings. It was in the people. The teasing and joking. The laughing and loving. And I know it was the working together—side-by-side— that made our Christmas meat pies so special.
    Jane Zaffino

Common Sense
    Select a cozy corner of your home to create a holiday haven—far from post-office lines, crowded malls and office parties—by engaging your senses.
    Sight: Display something that delights you—ice skates from your childhood, an heirloom Bible opened to the Christmas story or even a basket of sea glass collected during last summer’s vacation.
    Sound: Hang tinkling wind chimes to catch a furnace draft or play an instrumental holiday CD.
    Smell: Light a seasonal candle—bayberry, pine or peppermint. Or select a fresh-from-the-oven scent like gingerbread, sugar cookie or pumpkin pie.
    Taste: Treat yourself to a soothing, warm drink. Hot chocolate with marshmallows? Spiced cider? Herbal tea?
    Touch: Layer the area with comfortable pillows, a soft throw, your favorite slippers—perhaps a few toys to entertain the cat.
    Then set aside time each day to envelope yourself in this sanctuary of simplicity.

Between the Lines
    Sometime last year, tucked in the muscled folds of a metropolitan newspaper in Italy, a diminutive advertisement tiptoed out to compete with screaming headlines.
    Elderly, retired schoolteacher seeks family willing to adopt grandfather. Will pay expenses.
    Eighty-year-old Giorgio Angelozzi had packed himself and his seven cats into the wrinkles of a two-room flat, along with his modest book collection of dusty Greek dictionaries and classics written by noteworthy ancients like Pliny and Horace and Kant. From this cramped home on a dead-end road, he occasionally maneuvered the hilly paths to a local village. But, for the most part, his scholarly, retired life was quiet. Too quiet.
    Widowed seven long, lonely years, Giorgio found himself counting the number of words he spoke aloud each day. And on those days when he had nothing to say—even to the padding cats—the count was zero. A zero as hollow as his life.
    To his dismay, he discovered he wasn’t done giving and needing love.
    Hungering for human contact, Giorgio made a thoughtful decision and put into motion a unique plan: He put himself up for adoption. His humble appeal in the classifieds of an area newspaper immediately captured the attention of an entire nation.
    Giorgio’s plight tugged at Italy’s heartstrings, made it sit up and take notice. Government officials and villagers, counselors and commoners, clerics and laymen—all jolted to the core by this plea for adoption—took an internal accounting. The result? An immediate surge of response that brought more than offers of lodging. It brought eager offers of friendship. Of family life. Of . . . love.
    After all, Giorgio didn’t advertise himself as a mere tenant. He didn’t seek a position as a part-time professor nor a salaried tutor. Instead, Giorgio sought a family willing to adopt a grandfather, a family willing to accept him as part of itself.
    At one time or another, each of us—like Giorgio—must face life’s tough, emotion-wrenching moments. We might deal with the trials of rejection, bankruptcy, terminal illness, loneliness, unhappy partnerships or even death. Love