The Big Read: Magic is alive, my friends

It's Christmas time, and although I'm not a believer, I make a concerted effort to suspend any latent Grinchness at this time of year. Each December I like to look for Christmas stories, happy tales of everyday magic and coincidence, small shiny things that twinkle in the purple dusk and make me smile.

This is my last column for 2016 so I'll tell two Christmas stories.

1. WHEN I was younger I had a very good friend who I'll call Violet. Ours was a good friendship, honest and platonic although she was very beautiful and I liked looking at her face in profile because it felt like being in the room with one of those proud and complicated aristocratic ladies on the fringes of Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury group. Just about two decades ago, I went home to Durban for Christmas. Christmas holidays were long and dragged on in those days and we wrote each other letters and I decided that I might be in love with her. Of course I wasn't in love with her - it was just distance, and a slight lostness in my life, and the hazy sadness of Christmas, and the way that handwritten letters sharpen and make more intense your feelings for the person who wrote them.

I wondered whether to declare my feelings when I returned, but it turns out I was too late because by that time she'd started seeing some guy. It was the best thing for everyone, without question, but after that I didn't get to see as much of her and we drifted apart.I led a somewhat peripatetic lifestyle at that time - this was before cellphones, and I didn't stay at any address for very long, and unless you were one of the people I regularly saw, it was hard to get hold of me. The next thing I knew, she was gone. Where had she gone? No one knew. Over the years I heard whispers that she might have moved overseas and married and was working as an artist and had changed her name but no one seemed to know to what. When Facebook happened I thought I might track her down but I've never found her there or via any of the other electronic means by which the world has been made smaller and less interesting.

For years now she has been my yeti or Loch Ness monster - proof that the world is still mysterious and capacious enough to take people and conceal them without a trace.

Then last week I received a message from someone in Durban. They encountered my name somewhere and it rang a bell and they reached out to find me. It seems they've been receiving letters addressed to me. The last one arrived five or six years ago, but there were several before that, every 18 months or so, stretching back years and years. They still have most of the letters, dropped casually in a chest of drawers in their hallway. They told me their address, and I realised that it's a simple error away from the address of my mother's flat in Durban 20 years ago. On the back of the most recent envelope is Violet's name, and a return address in Italy.

What a gift is this to receive at Christmas! A package of letters from the past being mailed to me from my old home town, containing the voice of someone for whom I've been looking for years, and also a way to start trying to find her. And oh the sweet anticipation of a parcel in the South African mail, wondering if it will reach me by Christmas, wondering if it will reach me at all.

2. THE other story is simpler, and not so much a story as simply something that makes me happy. Next Saturday afternoon I'll put on my good suit, as bright and blue as a Christmas bauble, and help my wife into the bright floral dress she bought in Singapore, and we'll share one of the paper parasols we gave the guests at our wedding, and we'll take my favourite walk through my neighbourhood to the beach, where we'll remove our shoes and carry them in one hand and walk out onto the sand to be present, and to cry a little, at the wedding of two of my favourite people. It will be a beautiful day and the ceremony will be beautiful and they will both be beautiful, and they will have a beautiful life together and live happily ever after and heck, it's Christmas time - we'll all live happily ever after. Much love, Rebecca Davis and Haji Mohamed Dawjee; the bells will ring for you. And much love to us all. See you next year and thank you for reading.