Red, greens, golds tumble inward, triangles crashing against circles, then outward, pushing out into ovals, the whole making a kind of psychedelic snowflake.

Remember looking upward and hoping for magic? And there it was, up against the light.

"People are touched by kaleidoscopes," Scott Cole, kaleidoscope artist, says. "Either there's some heart connection as a child or it took them someplace that they'd never been before emotionally."

Cole heard the siren call of kaleidoscopes when he was taking a stained-glass course at a community college in Charlotte in 1983.

Cole, a counselor by profession, began making kaleidoscopes as a way of balancing the intensity of being a counselor. Now, he has pretty much retired his slate to make kaleidoscopes his full-time gig.

"Actually, I've probably had more positive effect in people's lives through the kaleidoscope things," he said. "For a lot of people it really has transformed their lives."

His first kaleidoscope was made out of old copper tubing. When he was done, he thought that surely he could make something more lovely. Twenty years later, he says, "I'm still trying to figure out how to make a really nice kaleidoscope."

As with many magical things, the kaleidoscope is the product of a blitzen of science and a dasher of fun. Invented in 1813 by Sir David Brewster, a Scottish scientist, the kaleidoscope enjoyed immense popularity during the Victorian era. Entrepreneur Charles Bush magnified the effect of the device by marketing it as a parlor toy. After their heyday, kaleidoscopes went dormant until the groovy 1970s, when they showed up in Christmas stockings across the land.

The construction is pretty simple, Cole says: "You've got mirrors, some kind of case for it, then you've got magic."

The mirrors are special mirrors, with the reflective stuff on the front, eliminating the distortion of the back-faced mirror, the one that lies gently to you every morning.

A tube keeps the mirrors together. Most often, three mirrors are connected into an equilateral triangle, creating a full plane of design. If there are just two mirrors, the resulting design is a circle.

The stuff of the design is at the end of the tube: color, texture, bling.

The magic is "color, shape, interaction of colors and shapes," Cole says. "Because they tumble over, you'll get infinite number of variations."

At the other end of the tube is an eyehole. This, really, is the magic part. Because without a person to look through it, the kaleidoscope is nothing.

Hold it up to the light and look down the narrow hall of mirrors to the magic. Without your laughing eye, as Cole calls it, there is no magic.

Cole lives in Brasstown, self-proclaimed opossum capital of the world, in the far western reaches of the state. It's home to the John C. Campbell Folk School, which has a category of classes called Kaleidoscopes. Cole teaches four or five classes a year there, but he's not the only instructor (this is a place that takes fun seriously).

When Cole first started trying to make a nicer kaleidoscope, folks thought the ones he was making were pretty swell. So he sold them at craft shows, including the Folk School's annual Fall Festival.

"People were nice and friendly and there was music and dance and such," he said. "I just thought this is too much fun."

With science taking care of the mirrors for Cole, he can focus on inner and outer beauty. He designs engraved metal cases, but, he says: "I like working with kaleidoscopes because it's a form, it's a concept. I can work with any material and combine them in many sorts of ways and still come up with a function kaleidoscope."

Cole kept going back to the festival and he started teaching there and then he moved there. Life is good.

"Part of what I enjoy the most is watching people enjoy them," he says.

"The magic is just something you gotta believe in," Cole says.

For as long as you look up and believe, there will be magic.

Merry Christmas.

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Last December, I visited Magnolia Glen to meet some women who made blankets for Project Linus. While I was there, I met Lillian Desiderio, knitter extraordinaire, and her husband, Frank. After 67 years of marriage, Lillian and Frank were infectiously in love, and I was smitten.

For decades, Frank made wooden toys and Lillian knitted sweaters for all the children they didn't have. Every day, Frank went down to his woodworking shop to make toys and birdhouses. On Sunday, Sept. 25, Frank lost a brief battle with pneumonia and left his woodworking tools idle for the first time in decades.

At his memorial service Oct. 1, I met his great-niece, Deb Allen, who had called me from Michigan to tell me of his death. Outside on the patio at Magnolia Glen, birds flitted around one of the many birdhouses that Frank made, while inside the craft room, some 60 people wiped tears from their eyes as a color guard handed a triangulated American flag to Lillian in recognition of Frank's Bronze Star service during World War II. As Tim Rothbauer said in his tribute, "We are better people for having known Uncle Frank."

To read the love story of Frank and Lillian, see www.newsobserver.com, key word notions, and find the Dec. 24, 2004, column. To pay respects to the life of Frank Desiderio, you may send donations to Hospice of Wake County.

To help Lillian knit her way into comfort, you might drop by with some yarn: Lillian is not very particular, but she does prefer yarn that doesn't squeak. Her friend, Mavis White, knows how to turn fabric into quilts for Project Linus -- just so you know. In times of great loss, we can all use a little security blanket.

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