Home from the zoo. I saw that a friend was performing as part of the Festival of Lights, and knowing how much our daughter loves lights and music, I suggested to my Mama we go. It was the first time we had gone on an outing for her. Whilst her mind won't remember, her body will, and experiences feel like the greatest gift I could give.

It was a spontaneous decision. In twenty minutes we were out the door and on our way in the back of an uber. Wrapped up in blankets with a little lion in hand, my baby's cute face pulled a smile into my cheeks and melted me, the way she so often does. I've never felt such deep devotion in my life. Her joy is my own, her comfort mine too.

We arrived to the sound of my friend's song floating on the air. Xoli is by far one of the most spirited performers I've ever come to know. My daughter's eyes wide, her body snug, she soaked in the laughter of children and twinkle of Christmas lights all around. After his set, Xoli came to greet us. He and Mr. Dzedze are from the same clan, they speak the same ancestral praises. He held Alatha, still besotted with the billion lights, and greeted her with their ancestral names. As kids from a local dance school dazzled, we ate pizza, caught up, hugged tight, and on he went into the night to prepare for another show tomorrow.

Mama and I walked on, little Alatha dreamed away in her pram. We pushed her along zoo pavements and greeted giant light sculptures. The giraffe was my favorite. Carols played through speakers and for the first time, an old feeling arrived. One that I've never met in South Africa before. One I didn't know could exist here. It swept me to my childhood: snow crunches beneath my steps, mittens over my hands, and my own eyes wide for the stalls at the Christkind Market in Frankfurt. A fire crackles in our English home, I fall asleep by the mishmash tree on Christmas eve with my brother, we wait for Santa to arrive. It was a spirit I felt there at Joburg zoo. A shimmer, a certain kind of Christmas magic that I didn't know could exist here in the southern hemisphere.

Enveloped in ideas of what the future might be, I thought of all the ways I might bring Christmas to life for my daughter in years to come. I contemplated the sentiment of this time and breathed in the gleam of this new life as a mother. I knew those lights would be a gift to my daughter. I didn't know they would be such a gift to me too. I've arrived home feeling the blessings of my own childhood, and want nothing more than to give that same wonder I felt to my daughter too.