Today, I wore my great-grandfather’s manual watch.

It’s somewhere between 60–80 years old, and has a broken second hand, but it still keeps great time. All it wants in return, is for you to wind it in the morning.

I thought I was wearing it because it felt more Christmasy than my other watches, but throughout the day I realized it was more than that.

I never got to meet my great-grandfather, Borden Wolcott. He died on April 5, 1975. But I still wore his watch.

I wore it today and it reminds me of sleeping at my great-grandmothers house in Red Bank, NJ as a kid and hearing their manually wound clock on the wall tick all night. I was always scared to sleep away from home, but the tick was comforting… I knew I was safe if I could hear the tick.

I wore it and I could almost imagine what Christmas was like for him and his little family before he died over 40 years ago. Him, my great-grandmother (Pauline, she passed on 2005), and their two children.

I wore it because even though I never met him, I was very close with my great-grandmother, and their daughter (my grandmother, Dolores, who passed this year) and it helped remind me of them all day.

I wore it because that house in Red Bank is roughly 1800 miles from where I am right now, and it helped me feel a little closer.

I wore it because as the years pass, and as members of my family pass, I’m glad to have things like this watch to stay connected with them.