The first days of the week were extra busy as preparations for Christmas continued. Miriam, Hannah, and Josiah baked something every day. Piles of cookies poured from the kitchen. Miriam and Hannah decided to do something special this year and assembled tins of homemade cookies and candy which they took around to our neighbors in Gold. They counted twenty-four households – the village of Gold is pretty small – and went out on Wednesday evening and delivered them. That evening the Shilligs came caroling, but they played bells instead of singing. It was great.
 |
| More baking. |
 |
| Assembling cookie trays. |
 |
| Ready to deliver. |
 |
| Bell carolers. |
It snowed on Wednesday and we began to hope we’d have a white Christmas after all. It wasn’t much snow, barely two inches, but it did a lot to make things look appropriately wintry. But our hope was vain. On Christmas Eve the snow turned to rain.
 |
| Snow on Wednesday. |
 |
| Wednesday. |
The Christmas carol that was stuck in my head for most of the week this time was God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen. It has always been a favorite of mine, probably because, unlike most of the carols, it is in a minor key. I’ve always liked music written in minor keys. I think it harmonizes with my generally moody personality. God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen is a very old carol. Although it was sung much earlier, it first appeared in print in 1760. There has been a lot of misunderstanding as to the meaning of the first phrase of the carol. Although many carol collections print it as “God rest you, merry gentlemen,” with the comma after “you,” it is really “God rest you merry, gentlemen,” with the comma after “merry.” The gentlemen are not merry. The historic and archaic meaning of the phrase “God rest you merry” is “may God grant you happiness.” Shakespeare uses the phrase in his comedy As You Like It (1599) in Scene 1 when William, a country gentlemen, says “God rest you merry, sir.” to Touchstone, the court jester. By the time Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843, the meaning of the archaic phrase had mostly been forgotten and replaced with “God bless you, merry gentlemen” and so he writes:
“At the first sound of ‘God bless you, merry gentlemen! May nothing you dismay!’, Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost.”
The Oxford Book of Carols gets it right and has all seven lovely verses, which I’ve never heard sung in their entirety.
Let nothing you dismay,
For Jesus Christ our Saviour
Was born upon this day,
To save us all from Satan’s power
When we were gone astray:
O tidings of comfort and joy etc.
This blessed babe was born,
And laid within a manger,
Upon this blessed morn;
To which his mother Mary
Nothing did take in scorn:
O tidings of comfort and joy etc.
A blessed angel came,
And unto certain shepherds
Brought tidings of the same,
How that in Bethlehem was born
The Son of God by name:
O tidings of comfort and joy etc.
“Let nothing you affright,
This day is born a Saviour,
Of virtue, power, and might;
So frequently to vanquish all
The fiends of Satan quite”:
O tidings of comfort and joy etc.
Rejoicéd much in mind,
And left their flocks a-feeding,
In tempest, storm and wind,
And went to Bethlehem straightway
This blessed babe to find:
O tidings of comfort and joy etc.
Whereat the infant lay,
They found him in a manger,
Where oxen feed on hay;
His mother Mary kneeling,
Unto the Lord did pray:
O tidings of comfort and joy etc.
All you within this place,
And with true love and brotherhood
Each other now embrace;
This holy tide of Christmas
All others doth deface:
O tidings of comfort and joy etc.
I spent Thursday doing some last minute housecleaning before company arrived. I cleaned the bathrooms, vacuumed, mopped the floors, and dusted. I like a tidy house at Christmas. After all the preparation – decorating, gift wrapping, and baking over the past weeks, everything began to come together on Thursday evening when the Thayns arrived. The energy level in the house immediately jumped to maximum intensity. Christmas for four girls under the age of ten is far more intense than for a houseful of adults.
On Friday we had lots of activities planned to keep that intensity under control. We took the Thayn girls and their Shillig cousins, Phi and Freyja, to a special matinee showing of Sing 2 – just our family (you get to do things like that when your grandma works for the owner’s family). When we got back from that, the Fosters were here waiting for us. We ate a quick lunch and then we had a gingerbread house decorating party. Sarah assembled the houses and everyone decorated them. There was so much candy for decorating.
 |
| At the theater. |
 |
| Making gingerbread houses. |
 |
| Our finished gingerbread houses. |
Friday evening we went over to Shillig’s house for our Christmas Eve celebration. The Shillig’s had quite a spread of hors d’oeuvres and charcuterie trays, crackers, cocktail wieners. After we ate, we played our favorite Christmas Eve games. Julie prepared and performed the Right-Left game where we handed wrapped gifts to the left or the right as she read a story filled with those words. Then we sang The Twelve Days of Christmas with assigned parts. After that we told stories of the births of the children in the room and the story of the birth of Jesus.
 |
| Christmas Eve at the Shillig's house. |
 |
| Christmas Eve at the Shillig's house. |
Stacey, Miriam, Hannah, Josiah, and I left the party and went in to Ulysses to attend a Christmas Eve service at the Ulysses Baptist Church. They had a nice service with carol singing and a guest violinist. When that was over we went back and joined the party at the Shillig’s house for dessert. There were so many delectable treats – cookies, candy, gingerbread, eggnog, wassail. Then we came home and sent the children to bed while the adults set out gifts and sat in the relative quiet and talked. I love the peace that settles on the house late on Christmas Eve when everyone finally retires. I sat in the quiet dark in bed and thought and remembered. The only light was the bayberry candle burning on the dresser reminding me of those I love who are not here with us. The house might have seemed quiet, but there was a latent excitement in the air, a sort of energy like a static charge waiting for morning to spark. Finally, after the peace felt complete, I closed my eyes and slept.
On Christmas morning the excitement and energy exploded, but not as early as I would have thought. It had rained in the night and it was gray and overcast. The last vestiges of snow were gone and it felt like a wet spring morning. I got up and tidied a bit downstairs as everyone else was stirring upstairs. I turned on the tree lights and the garlands to cheer the somber grayness outside. Upstairs it got noisier as more people woke up. By 8:00 everyone was ready. I made them wait upstairs until I took our traditional Christmas Morning Staircase Photo. Finally, the excitement could not be contained and everyone poured down the stairs. Next came an hour or two of opening gifts. There were so many great and thoughtful gifts! After opening gifts, the rest of the morning was spent playing with new toys and games. One of the best gifts was for Stacey. Rachel and Miriam worked together to redo all the baby white portraits. We'd taken them down years ago because their frames were in bad shape. Rachel and Miriam bought new frames and mounted them and had them in the upstairs hall on Christmas morning. Stacey had no idea they'd been working on them and burst into tears when she saw them.
 |
| Christmas morning early. |
 |
| On the stairs waiting to come down. |
 |
| Our baby white portraits hanging in the upstairs hall again. |
Christmas dinner is a set meal at our house. Our traditional menu is ham, funeral potatoes, zesty carrots, pistachio salad, and fruit salad. We did not vary this year. We never do. Dessert later was leftover goodies from Christmas Eve. It was all so delicious. After dinner, the games and puzzles continued on into the night. We had a very merry day.
 |
| Christmas dinner. |
Today our church meeting was only one hour. We sang our last Christmas carol for our opening hymn, I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. For the intermediate hymn, our family sang Ring Out, Wild Bells. Josiah was one of the speakers. Now we are home and lunch preparations are underway – an amazing charcuterie tray and lots of leftovers from yesterday. After lunch we will settle into an afternoon of sitting around and playing games, working on jigsaw puzzles, reading, and chatting.
The Fosters are leaving tomorrow, but the Thayns have decided to stay until New Years. Tabor will go home tomorrow, but Rachel and the girls will stay. Tabor will come back up on Thursday.Tomorrow we will take down the Christmas decorations and start tidying for the new year. After denying us a white Christmas, it looks like Nature will overcompensate this week. The forecast says we can expect some snow on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday. So it looks like our house will be lively all week long. I hope you had a Merry Christmas and may God rest you merry in the New Year!
