Our christmases have all been like clockwork. Always Christmas Eve dinner at Grandma's, with the china and the silver and the crown roast of pork. Home, kids in pajamas, and to bed, nights up late stuffing stockings and wrapping. One year assembling a play kitchen, one year building a train table.

Up at 6 or 7, kids bounding out of bed to find stockings and presents, scones in our pajamas, music and lights and the dog in the middle of piles of wrapping, the kind of noisy Christmas morning the Grinch would have hated. All the noise, noise, noise!

But this year, it's all changed. They're teens now. My husband is a nurse, and has managed to dodge Christmas duty for years, until now. It's our turn, long past our turn, and he's working tomorrow. We're having dinner, and presents and stockings when dad gets home, at 4:30 p.m.

It's just me and the kids, like a lot of Saturdays and Sundays when we're on our own. I'll make a nice breakfast. Maybe we'll make make gingerbread cookies. Maybe we'll watch a movie.

Then the kids and I are going downtown. We're not churchgoers. It's a long story, but we're just not. But we're going downtown, to a church basement, where a college friend of mine runs a ministry to the homeless. And we're serving lunch. And handing out seventy-five gift-wrapped hats. Warm hats.

It feels weird. I can't possibly fix everything wrong with the homeless population with hats, or with a Christmas lunch. It feels like spitting in the wind, like a feel-good opportunity for pampered suburbanites in warm houses with wall-to-wall carpet, Netflix, and coffee makers. It doesn't really change anything--I'm still living indoors with my carpet and my furnace, and my kids who have so much they don't even know what they want for Christmas--and they're still outdoors under a bridge, but now with a meal and a hat. I wonder what I'm really doing this for--to avoid sitting home and watching movies all day with the kids? Homeless adults aren't cute like puppies or small children. They're kinda scary and they talk to themselves and often smell bad. But they're people. They're somebody's son or daughter, someone's brother or sister. My college friend calls them "my friends who live outdoors."

I'm following my heart on this one, some random tugging I don't understand, to catapult us into something we've never done before. And there we'll be, handing out hats. Things are changing. The earth is shifting under my feet. I'm feeling the urge to move, to change, to learn something new, to leave something behind, to see things in a new way.

Santa's not coming until dinnertime.

I'm trying to save the world with hats.