He comes running at me with open arms and I bend down for a nuzzle, for who would refuse a three-year-old’s embrace? But then I see he is puckering up and is aiming for the lips and I start to panic. This may not be the nicest response from a grandmother for I do love my grandchildren. I love them on the changing table. I love their stinky socks. I love their shoes full of sand they dump on the rug.

I love their messes, but I fear their juices. Especially this time of year when every grandparent knows that even the most adorable of creatures are made of mucous.

That got me to thinking that maybe we need to teach small children to air kiss, to go cheek to cheek, kiss-kiss, like the French and other Europeans, which might limit our exposure to germ central.

Problem is I never can remember if you’re supposed to start on the right or the left when doing the two-cheek peck.  My California friend Caitlin who runs an inn in the Dordogne part of France says she tends to aim left, but finds it often a random and individual decision. She opts to lean forward and tries to sense where the other is heading.   Following the other’s lead, like in ballroom dancing.

She said little French kids adapt the two- cheek kiss early, but she’s not sure if that has any impact on the French flu and cold season.

I grew up in a family which pretty much limited hugs and kisses to a few friends and relatives. But I’m a Californian where everyone is a liberal when it comes to hugging. Our grandkids are natural born huggers and kissers. They get together and trade slurpy kisses, piling on each other like puppies. In fact the 16-month-old kind of kisses like a dog, sticking out his tongue to lick a favorite face.

They are a delight but in winter I must think of them as Sneezy, Wheezy and Drippy.

I was encouraged to read lately that cold and flu experts say the nose is deadlier than the mouth in terms of germ passing. The quantity of virus on the lips and mouth is less than the nasal juices. That actually makes kisses safer than sneezes.

In this department there has been progress. Many adults grew up being told only to “cover your mouth” when hit by a sneeze or cough, which is fine but then you have to do clean-up on your hands.  Today’s kids are trained to go one better. They use their elbow to capture the spray. This is known as the Dracula sneeze, the sleeve sneeze and the elbow sneeze.

This avoids blasting everyone in close range and is hygienically superior to exploding into your hand.  Two of our three grandkids have mastered this, probably because their mother, an elementary school teacher, pretty much spends the cold season reminding all people, small and big, to go for the elbow.

The toddler grandkid is too young for that lesson and still delivers his ka-choos with abandon. But he has good role models and hopefully will soon be sneezing into his sleeve.  We grandparents are also trying to remember to use our elbows. And keeping our hands and mouths to ourselves. With all that, plus hand sanitizer and a flu shot we all may make it to spring and the kissing season.

Instead of our usual Winter Lite we are having record cold. A cold snap, they call it. Nothing as punishing as in other parts of the country. A Kansan might poo-poo how we fret over our lemon tree, wrapped up l­­­­ike a dowager on a cruise ship. A New Englander might not share my delight in how my neighbor’s frosted roof glimmers in the dawn.

I relish the cold. I’m glad that our winter has strongly declared itself this year. I like a two blanket night and the dog under the covers. A fast hike in the bright cold.  A hot tea afternoon with a good book.

We celebrated the winter solstice in December with candles and hot pepper soup, a toast to the shortest day of the year. After the solstice the daylight would grow but there would also be more winter. I reread Mary Oliver’s poem about winter coming.  ”So let us go on though the sun be swinging east and ponds be cold and black,” she wrote in “Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness.” To me, the message is that the earth and maybe humanity need the darkness in order to start again. “In order that it may resume,” she said.

In winter we warm our hands in each others coat pockets. We sit by the wood stove, which, in our case, is really a gas burner with faux red coals.  And huddle under my mother-in-law’s nubby apricot blanket, all wool, made in the USA. I call it “the Eloise,” as in “it’s freezing in here, where’s the Eloise?”

When a friend died his Native American soul-mate instructed those who had gathered at the hospital to go back to his home and build a small wood fire in the yard. It should keep burning for at least four days, and it would be the obligation, he said, not of the family, but of friends, to tend the fire. That fire has now been going for a week, there being no pummeling rain to douse it and enough friends with firewood to contribute. It stays lit from the last log at night to the first one in the morning.

Visitors toss weeds and herbs into the fire – sprigs of sage, rosemary and lavender that haven’t shriveled up in the overnight freezes. It’s a fine way to pay one’s respect and comfort each other. I think the idea is to encourage the spirit of the dead on its journey. This fire also lifts the spirits of the living.

People stand around the fire, warm their hands and swap stories about our cowboy-reporter-conservationist friend.

Winter gives us a close-up look at nature. The hydrangea bushes dropped all their leaves together in one night, like dancers fluffing their skirts. Every morning the dog and I pass the rose bush down the street, all twigs but for one tattered red bloom. The birds come close in winter if you wait quietly. I stand at my kitchen sink and nibble toast while they breakfast ’round the bird-feeder.

Our days will warm up, we count on that here. But there will be more winter, more birds and stories, and then like Mary Oliver promises, we will resume.

We made it through another Christmas without Barbie. We’re just buying time, I know, for there will surely come a day when the doll will show up in our granddaughter’s arms. One cannot entirely protect a child from the world of silly toys anymore than sugary drinks, but this year the only hot blonde sharing our holiday was a visiting Lab-Retriever mix named Maisie.

Our granddaughter reportedly asked Santa for a Barbie, for the third straight year, but her mother dismissed the request as “almost Pavlovian. You put her on a Santa lap and she says, “I want a Barbie.” The rest of the year she doesn’t mention the doll.

Wise Santa instead brought her a big white board on which she promptly began drawing pictures and posting first grade math. I say that not only to brag but to point out that she already is smarter than the Barbie model from 10 years ago who pouted, “Math class is tough.”

There was a new Barbie version in the stores this year which was featured in a front page story in the New York Times on how more dads are doing the toy-shopping. The Barbie construction set comes with pink building blocks, and is intended to lure reluctant fathers into Barbie’s world, the thinking being that dads may resist helping their besotted daughters dress and undress Barbie but will help build her a Barbie beach house or luxury mansion.

This story caused predictable snickering among long-time Barbie-bashers like myself who wondered if Barbie would be part of the construction crew or just sit there and look pretty and how would she ever swing a hammer without her super-sized anatomy getting in the way.

Barbie just plain annoys me. Little girls playing with dolls that have womanly bodies give me the creeps.  It’s like finding a Cosmo magazine stuck inside a book of nursery rhymes.  It’s the old blah-blah argument about worrying that little girls are growing up too fast and then giving then an augmented 25-year-old for a best friend.

However, there seems to be no proof that Barbie, who is marketed for four-year-olds and up, and looks like she doesn’t keep her dinner down and is Botoxed from head to pointy toes, does any measurable harm as the young doll-owners grow up. You probably can’t entirely blame the cultural pressure on little girls wanting big girl lingerie and adult women obsessed with body image and dieting on one vacuous doll, although it would be handy.

I do wonder if there might be a Barbie link to explain why TV anchorwomen feel compelled to appear in skimpy cocktail dresses, even in January when it’s obviously chilly enough in the studio for their male counterparts to need a sweater vest.

The only doll under the tree this year went to our 15-month-old grandson. It’s a soft little boy doll with messy hair who comes with a shirt to button and a belt to buckle and shoes to lace up. There were no toy guns and no camouflage onesies but he did receive a toy tool set, similar to the one I gave his mother when she was his age. That daughter also had a baby doll that looked like a little kid, not a grown up, and who had brown skin. I was nothing if not a zealot.

The latest grandchild also got a CD of “Free to Be, You and  Me,” so he can sing along with the rest of us on such classics as “It’s All Right to Cry” by football giant Rosey Grier. It’s been around since the 70s and I’m betting it will prove to have  legs even longer than you-know-who.