BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The clock is dark green, a wooden rectangle about the size of a small book.

Two people smile up from the lower third of its face. A man and a woman in well-tailored suits, posing in front of a thick screen of shrubbery.

They are my parents. The photograph, which actually began as two pictures, is their engagement portrait. And the clock, now brightly wrapped and sent off to California, is a Christmas gift to my sister.

A photo revival shop has reconstructed the picture, moving my parents from the two individual snapshots into the one scene together. After 56 years of photographic separation, their arms now actually appear to touch. Their faces seem only inches apart.

It is an extraordinarily happy picture. I understand why when my mother tells me that she had taken my father's picture, and he had taken hers. I look at their smiles again. They are wide and open, directed at the objects of their love.

The clock is my favorite among the gifts I have purchased this Christmas. I look at it again and again before I carefully send it away.

Two as one

I am fascinated by the dynamic added when the two figures were joined together. It is all the more poignant because my father has been dead for 16 years, and his home farm, the site of the photograph, passed out of the family several years ago.

The shrubs are long gone. The handsome suits have disappeared. Even the couple, much as I may wish them to, cannot stand side by side in the sweet glisten of a summer's day.

But far from making me melancholy, the picture gives me great joy. My mother and father did have that summer day. They exchanged those exuberant smiles. And the love that is so palpable, so strangely powerful in that quiet garden scene, has survived death and distance and the wear of time.

''I think this clock keeps eternal time,'' I write to my sister.

The small miracle of the clock is the miracle of this holiday, and of those of other religious faiths celebrated throughout the year.

They allow us to move people and times together at will. To join moments from our childhood with celebrations of the day. To bring back people who are gone from us.

We see the gleaming dishes, smell the dinners, hear the laughter, see the faces.

Suddenly we are small again, free again, exuberant. Our parents are young and strong and well, to be blissfully taken for granted.

We are teen-agers, shopping for our friends, looking forward to a holiday vacation. Sleeping in.

We are college students, home for break. We feel older, different. But home is still home, and we relish its reliable comforts.

We are young adults, in love. We shop tentatively but enthusiastically for our sweethearts. The world seems wrapped in shining lights.

Christmas is never one Christmas. It is every Christmas of our lives. We acknowledge that in our celebration of it. We bring out the same decorations, observe the same traditions. We cannot help but think of Christmases past.

And therein lies part of the power of this and every holiday.

Who we once were

Daily life tears us away from the past, pushes us roughly into the future. We have barely enough time to digest what happened to us today, and to share it with our spouses over dinner. We have no time for connecting it to the past, for joining who we are to who we once were.

It leaves us emotionally disjointed. We are all these different people, who have led all these different lives. No one understands them as a single context, least of all ourselves.

The secret gift of this season, then, is that it allows us to reconstruct the scenes ourselves. We can pick them up, like the separate photographs of my mother and father, and join them together.

Arms touch. Faces hover. Souls connect.

It is worth the rush of the season, worth the frenzy and exhaustion a million times over.

It is the gift of memory, the joy of connection. It is the celebration of the threads of love and tradition that make up Christmas and, taken together, form our lives.

Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati 45202 or fax at 768-8340.