“I’m so excited for your holidays this year!” my friend wrote to me in an email this week. “They are going to be your best ever!”

I assume by “best” she’s talking about the fact that after decades of being single, this will indeed be my first “married” holidays.

Sure enough, I’m excited to spend Christmas and Hanukkah with my new husband, our kids and our wacky assortment of animals. While it will be special, between you and me, I don’t know that it will be my best holiday ever.

That honor would go to Christmas 2008, a holiday season that - as fate would have it - was also my worst. Best and worst all in the same year? How’s that possible?

The worst began as it did for so many years around Labor Day, when people with significant others and “normal” families start making their holiday plans. For me, it always brought a lump in my stomach. “Here we go again, the huge lift to dance your way through and visit other people’s holidays,” I thought.

It truly was my loneliest time of the year.

I just didn’t have it in me to do the dance one more time, so I reached out to a woman named Kate Fletcher. She’s a remarkable soul from Pittsburgh who started “Hekima Place,” a home for orphaned girls on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya.

I met Kate through email correspondence as I covered her inspiring story for my website, DarynKagan.com. She would end each email with: “You really must come visit us here in Kenya!”

That, of course, was an absurd idea, until it wasn’t. I was just sad and lonely enough to want to do something different with the holidays in 2008.

That’s how I ended up writing to Kate and asking if the invitation was still good.

“Most of our girls go home to extended family over the holidays,” she wrote back. “But if the idea of spending Christmas with 13 little girls who have no one in the world to call family sounds good to you, then yes! Please come!”

That’s how my worst Christmas ever turned into the best. The gift of watching a young girl open her single present on Christmas morning like it was the Hope Diamond. The way each child waited her turn, peeling away the Scotch tape so as to not tear the wrapping paper. The gift of treating them to swim lessons in a hotel pool or petting a giraffe at the local animal sanctuary. Now that was a Christmas to remember.

I share this on the possible chance that this is shaping up to be your worst Christmas ever. Maybe you lost someone you loved very much this past year, have money or health challenges. Maybe your life is just really hard right now.

I know for me things had to be uncomfortable enough to take a chance; to do things differently. I fully believe the leap I took by going to Africa and getting to see the purest form of Christmas in the eyes of those sweet girls opened my heart in a way that led me to the family I have today.

So if things are looking down, I offer this ray of holiday hope: These hard times, your hurting heart, your worst Christmas ever just might lead you to do things differently this year. That difference could be the first step through a door where dreams come true.

This crummy Christmas might just be one of the biggest gifts you’ll ever receive.