After celebrating an early Christmas with the Thayns last weekend, the week seemed to drag by. It was almost like I was suffering from the post-holidays slump. I had to keep reminding myself that Christmas is still ahead. I think the whole house seemed a bit subdued for a while. Slowly things began to perk up. After last weekend the tree was bare of presents, but during the week more wrapped gifts began to appear under the tree again. Miriam was busy baking during the week and yesterday we all decorated sugar cookies. And all week long we listened to our Christmas music and watched some of our Christmas movies and that helped revive the spirit.
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| Decorating sugar cookies. A sample of our work. Miriam's cookies. |
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We had a spell of warmer weather during the week – by warmer I mean most days were in the high 30's to the low 40's. The snow began to melt and on Friday, when rain came and the temperature rose to a balmy 51°, what little was left disappeared. I took a walk up to the hollow and back midweek just to see what was happening in this little part of the world I inhabit. I hadn’t been on a walk in a long time. Everything looked soggy and bedraggled. I’m not a big fan of snow, but if there is one time in the year that I want snow on the ground, it’s at Christmas. It makes things look clean and truly Christmassy. I hold Irving Berlin responsible for that perception (we watched White Christmas last week – we watch it every year and love it). But it was beginning to look like we’d have no snow here this Christmas. In the 19 years we’ve lived here, we’ve had four or five non-white Christmases. It always disappoints me. I want snow at Christmas. I know there will be plenty more of it later in the winter and on into the spring when I’m not so keen to see it.
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| Scenes from my walk: wild hydrangea berries, the beaver pond, wild apples, the woods. |
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| Scenes from my walk: up the road, the hollow, ice in the hollow. |
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| Scenes from my walk: the creek in the hollow, headed back, across the pasture, almost home. |
We passed the solstice on Friday so it’s officially winter now. The first day of winter was a strange day. It was gloomy, rainy, and warm all day (that 51° I just mentioned). I took a walk around the garden during a brief interval when it wasn’t pouring rain. The garden looks a mess. Everything is flat and mushy. Even so, I managed to find some violas blooming amidst the ruins of the garden. It made me happy to see them there. As night time arrived, cold air began to push in. There was thunder and lightning – very strange for the first day of winter. During the night it grew colder and the rain turned to snow, so we do have a little bit on the ground now. Our Christmas will be white after all. The passing of the solstice means the days are growing imperceptibly longer. Six months from now we’ll be in glorious June. But for now, the days are still short and the nights long and dark. I have a set of CD albums from Windham Hill Records called A Winter's Solstice. There are six albums in the series. I listened to them that day, as I do every year on the winter solstice. They brought a flood of memories sometimes so intense I had to stop what I was doing and just listen to the music.
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| The garden on Friday. |
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| Viola on the first day of winter. |
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| On Friday. |
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| On Saturday. |
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| A Winter's Solstice albums. |
I think that Christmas is a complex holiday. I know if we are being purists, we would say that it isn’t complex at all – it is simply the celebration of the birth of Jesus. That may be the kernel of it, but there are a lot of other layers wrapped around it. I’ve already written about the pagan solstice celebrations that were grafted into the holiday. These traditions have been a part of Christmas for so long now that they have been completely assimilated and we don’t really remember or care where they came from anymore. The decorations, trees, lights, candles, caroling, gift giving, the food, the parties – it wouldn’t seem like Christmas without these.
A major layer of complexity is the commercialization of the holiday. Santa Claus and presents have become the biggest part of the holiday for most people. The health of our economy is dependent on and gauged by how much we buy at Christmas. We are so focused on the gifts that we don’t realize how deep it really goes. I’ve noticed that when we talk about our most memorable Christmases, it usually revolves around gifts – even when the point we are trying to make is that it isn’t about gifts. We just switch the emphasis to the gifts we gave rather than the gifts we got and that makes it seem more noble and memorable – but it’s still all about gifts. I don’t think there’s any going back when it comes to gifts. We like it too much. And it really wouldn’t feel like Christmas without the excitement surrounding giving and receiving presents.
For me the most profound layers of Christmas complexity are the memories. Overwhelming memories are woven through the whole celebration – memories stretching from my earliest childhood to the present day. Most of them are happy memories, some of them are sad. That’s what makes it seem so complicated. As I grow older, I find myself feeling sad almost as often as I feel happy as the memories rise up in me. The happy memories are easy to account for. Being with family and friends, the excitement of opening gifts, the delight in the delicious food – remembering these things from the past and experiencing them in the present and anticipating them in the future makes me happy. The sad memories are tender feelings composed of nostalgia for an innocent and idealized past mixed with a longing for people I love who are not with me now. I feel it when I hear certain pieces of Christmas music. I feel it especially when the house is quiet and I’ve allowed myself time to sit in the dark by the light of the tree and reflect. That’s when I’m visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past.
I used to wonder why the English associate ghosts with Christmas. We all know the ghosts in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but he wrote other Christmas books – The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man, plus dozens of shorter Christmas stories. Most of them contain some ghostly element. American author Washington Irving and other notable authors also wrote Christmas ghost stories. In England there is an old tradition of sitting around the fire on Christmas Eve and telling ghost stories. I think these ghostly tales were born of the darkness and gloom of the season and the powerful memories of the past that the holiday evokes. Traditions stretching back into prehistory make the season feel ancient. I feel more and more haunted at Christmastime as I grow older and the memories of Christmases past compound.
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| Original illustrations from A Christmas Carol. |
I love Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I’ve read it more times than I can count. I’ve never seen a screen adaptation of it that did it justice. If you’ve only ever seen a movie version of it, I recommend you read it. It is a wonderful story. Every time I read it, I’m moved by the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge, through the ministrations of the Ghosts, from a hard-hearted miserable miser to “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good city knew, or any other good city, town, or borough, in the good old world. . . . and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.” I hope that can be said of all of us.
I wish you the very Merriest Christmas and God bless us, everyone.
