Be careful of what you wish for, or in the case of your columnist, of what you write, whose name you take in vain, or who you summons as if by magic with a mere time-frayed recollection.
Christmas Day this year was held in suspenseful abeyance by the weather: specifically the weather in the northern hemisphere and Europe in particular where Son Two was embarking on a flight and due home late afternoon on December 25.
He made it out of Dublin on the second-to-last flight, albeit sufficiently delayed to miss his connections and thus join the hordes of displaced and misplaced international travellers huddling like refugees on the polished now-littered floors of crowded departure lounges.
Fortune smiled on him - or perhaps a bit of the luck of the Irish had rubbed off during his year's sojourn - and he was rerouted and dispatched homewards.
All went well until touchdown in Christchurch whereupon it became evident that providence had not so kindly regarded his luggage.
He almost missed the last flight to Dunedin trying to source it - and thus the specially requested turkey dinner that awaited his arrival.
Great to have him home and never mind the bags: his guitar has since fronted but as I write, the suitcase and its year's worth of memorabilia remains with others in the lost luggage rooms of the globe's airports.
So that made our Christmas.
But to return to the sorcery of a columnist's invocation, the icing on the cake was a call received on Boxing Day.
Regular readers will recall a meditation on our ceremonious graduation processions in last week's Smoko, and an illustrative tidbit on an old Italian flatmate - last seen at his Piedmont wedding nigh on 30 years ago - who impressed upon me the virtues and values of ritual.
Well, knock me over with a feather, come Boxing Day morning said flatmate, let's call him Giovanni, was on the phone to us from Timaru.
He was in New Zealand for a couple of weeks with his wife Gabriella and was that very day travelling to Dunedin.
Notwithstanding certain work commitments, of course it was unthinkable that they should pass through without stopping by.
A slow news day and the efficiency and generosity of colleagues meant that I was able to get home in time for a late dinner in the company of some wonderful old friends.
The evening, the food, the wine and the conviviality peeled away those years as if they had not for one moment intervened.
A precious friendship renewed in an utterly unexpected encounter. Shall we chalk that one up as a small Christmas miracle?
Under the Christmas tree, to add to my pile of the season's reading which will not begin until I knock off for a week or two at New Year, was John Lanchester's, Whoops: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No-One Can Pay, an expose on the world of contemporary finance.
I'm looking forward to it, since it was Lanchester's London Review of Books article "Cityphilia" of some two years or so back that, for me, provided in the wake of the financial meltdown the most engaging and razor sharp commentary on the murky, messy and catastrophic world of modern banking.
As a companion piece I will finish off our own reserve bank governor Allan Bollard's account of the meltdown and how the reserve bank and government of the day responded.
Crisis: One Central Bank Governor and the Global Financial Collapse is a very readable account of what might be considered matter so dry as to be combustible, and a valuable contribution to the cause of making us all a little less economically illiterate.
If I haven't had quite a belly full of the world of high finance by then, I might dip into Liaquat Ahamed's well-reviewed Lords of Finance: 1929, The Great Depression and the Bankers Who Broke the World.
You may be relieved to hear, dear reader, that I do have some books without subtitles on the holiday bedside table: masterly Scots crime writer Ian Rankin's The Complaints and, as a companion piece, our own - borrowed for now at least while he's Stuart Professor of Scottish Studies at the University of Otago - Liam McIlvanney's All the Colours of the Town.
Another Scots crime novel, this one with Belfast-Glasgow politics mixed in, and thus far, highly enjoyable.
Next up, an old colleague from the Independent in London, Kiwi author Peter Walker who has written a second novel, The Courier's Tale, a story of diplomacy, passion and treachery in the time of Henry VIII.
Walker's first book, published in 2001, was The Fox Boy, an engaging novelistic treatment of early Maori-Paheha relations.
Just for good measure I'll "luxuriate in the pleasure" of another stellar University of Otago offering: Jim Flynn's The Torchlight List: Around the World in 200 Books, a treatise on reading, knowledge and the imagination.
Catching up with old friends and relations, and reading - great pleasures of the season.
I can hardly wait.
- Simon Cunliffe is deputy editor (news) of the Otago Daily Times.