There are few gifts under the tree in our house this year.    
  This is our sixth Yule season in this house, and this year it’s just the two of us and a dog and a cat. 
  The lighted tree by the front windows is one of the prettiest we’ve ever had, but I think we say that every year. 
  Our grandsons are visiting their other grandparents this year, and our daughter’s job demands all of her time on the eve of Y2K. 
  Barb and I have the house to ourselves, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. 
  This place where we live with a view of water and mountains grew out of dreams from my youth. 
  The house, though, bears little resemblance to the detailed drawings and grandiose ideas that came out of a period in high school when my girlfriend got the idea from some teen magazine that we should go for a couple of weeks without touching each other to see if we were truly in love. I had to do something with my hands, so I drew house plans. 
  The passage of decades, and perhaps a lessening of hormonal tension, tempered some of my niftier ideas. 
  I had envisioned a split-level house at the top of a bluff overlooking the ocean. From the land side, it would appear to be a typical rambler, but from the beach below, it would resemble an eagle’s nest. 
  A stone fireplace would form a wall at one end of the living area. Behind it would be my den, all wood and stone, an indoor garden with lots of tomato plants year round, frogs and turtles, and maybe even a model railroad running through it, all open indirectly to outside air. I hadn’t worked out the details. 
  All furniture in the living and dining areas would be suspended from the ceiling or on beams extending from the walls. There would be nothing resting on the hardwood floor. 
  That floor was my prize invention. It would appear to be composed of wood strips an inch wide, but that would be an illusion. What looked like narrow strips would be the edges of wider flooring boards beveled at 45 degrees but smooth and level because the boards would also lie at 45 degrees. The floor in cross section would resemble a closed Venetian blind. 
  Each of those hundreds of boards would be mounted on its own axle. At the touch of a button, the floorboards would rotate in unison 90 degrees, from their normal 45 degrees to 45 degrees beyond vertical in the other direction. 
  The walking surfaces would then be vertical and all dust and dirt would fall off. Push another button and, as the floorboards rotated back to their normal position, the dirt would fall between the boards to the ground. The sole reason for this extravagance would be to avoid having to sweep. 
  Neither the labor-saving floor nor the open-air grotto of a den made it to the reality of this house. It sits, not on a constantly eroding bluff, but near the crest of a gentle hill. It doesn’t look like a rambler from any angle. 
  I’d wanted to build a house in the middle of 20 acres of my own woods so I’d never have to worry about looking out of my windows into someone else’s, but I find as I grow older I am less antisocial than I’d imagined myself to be, less inclined to be a hermit. For this and many other reasons, we moved east instead of west, from 40 inches of rain a year in Port Angeles to less than 18 inches near Sequim. 
  Building this house took much longer than I’d expected, but everything takes longer than I expect. It’s too bad that I swore I’d never do it again; next time, I’d know what I was doing. 
  Christmas music is playing softly on the radio, the tree is bright with lights, and the cat and dog are sleeping. I put another piece of wood in the stove and we look out at the moon rising over the bay. 
  We don’t need gifts under our Christmas tree this year. Our health is good and we are not hungry. This house is gift enough, and we have everything else we need.