The best gifts don't need occasions. They only need the impulse of Christmas unconfined by the calendar. I believe that when we remove the obstacle of limited expectations, and reject short-sighted concepts of the most desirable gifts, good happens. It's an underlying law of the cosmos.

A few years ago my brother's family drove from Virginia to Vermont for a week in the place where I learned to love winter. Three young girls and their dog Katy tumbled out of the station wagon and crunched through the powder-dry snow to add their warmth to our home.

Christmas Day went by at warp speed. In short order, our expanded family had covered the floors and furniture with boots, mittens, socks, stray sweaters, books, wrapping-paper shreds, food fragments, kid toys, dog toys, dog dishes, and all the miscellany of vagabond Americans on holiday.

I loved the chaos at first—"So this is how the nuclear family does cold fusion!" But with the ruins of order came territorial dust-ups, and the sounds of nightly videos and pay-per-view movies. My brother cut short a day of skiing for the girls when below-zero temperatures made it brutal on the slopes. Soon we all needed a way out of confinement—the gift of a new idea more than of another material thing.

That gift was closer than I thought possible, and in a form I couldn't preconceive. Maybe it only needed the right kind of craving to become visible, the simplest form of asking. Our neighbor, Valerie, also has three daughters. But to this point, no connections had happened among the six girls, and there had been no apparent interest among our shy trio. The familiar WHACK-WHACK of our brass doorknocker, though, announced a visit from one of the next-door girls. They were going to ice skate tonight on the frozen marsh between our backyards and the river. Did we want to join them for skating and a weenie roast? Instant unity.

That night, in air colder than that on those wind-chilled ski runs, six girls skated around a fire on ice. We munched hot dogs and drank cold soda—and laughed, as I guess anyone would, at the very idea of sub-zero picnics. It was a gift I won't forget.

Beyond my almost tactile memory of being so warm on ice, there's the memory of the longing that came first. I think we all, without words interfering, desired something better, something good. God, being Good itself, answered with goodness.

Mary Baker Eddy distilled the essence of prayer as the heart's longing in a short paragraph on page one of her book Science and Health: "Thoughts unspoken are not unknown to the divine Mind. Desire is prayer; and no loss can occur from trusting God with our desires, that they may be moulded and exalted before they take form in words and in deeds."

Many of us, especially at this time of year, long just for a quiet moment to think about the things that really matter, the God-given gifts of health and love and unbreakable connections. It's a good time to do a quality check on one's longings. Sometimes the question isn't, Am I asking for the right things? Rather it is, Are my desires pure enough, and big enough? Maybe all those greeting-card wishes for peace on earth aren't so empty after all. Perhaps to be real—to change the world—they just need each of us to add our gram of momentum to a universal urge.

The Biblical figure Abraham longed to find even ten righteous men in Sodom, to prevent the city's destruction. Do I long as deeply as he did for the goodness of the people in Baghdad to be found? At least as much as I yearn to see evil motives uncovered and any weapons of mass destruction destroyed? Do I long to see willing, honest peacemaking as much as I want to see sober preparation for war? It's a good season to check those wish lists.