The candles are burning, and some old carols are playing; dinner is cooking – rice with saffron, cranberries and almonds, topped with a breast of chicken rubbed with paprika and nutmeg. Tomorrow I will go to blahfeme's for Christmas dinner, but tonight is quiet and at home.
***
I love Christmas stories, poems, plays, vignettes.
All right, not all of them: when Project Gutenberg re-publishes newspaper schlock from the 1870s, I am frankly not amused. But the brilliant ones, the well-written ones – starting, of course, with
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.
– those are worth their weight in tinsel. Although there is actually no other Dickens I really like, that particular one is endlessly rereadable, and brilliant – I don't know if it's because I was trained to like it or what, but there are so many wonderful sentences, images, and moments.
And some of the other familiar ones –
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
But she hugged them to her, and at length she was able to smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Jim... Oh! You haven't seen your beautiful present! Isn't it a dandy, Jim? A platinum watch chain, I hunted all over town to find it. Give me your watch, I want to see how it looks on it."
A letter saying so merely confirms the news that some secret vein had already received, severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself, letting it loose, like a kite on a broken string. That is why, walking across the campus on this December morning, I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, almost like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven.
It came a floweret bright / amid the cold of winter, / when half-spent was the night.
And some of my own favorites that you probably don't know: sentimental, funny, sad, or even sinister –
Here were the popcorn strings my mother strung when I was the youngest child, and the paper bells Larry and I made when he was so small it seems unbelievable now, and the jigsaw Santa my husband cut out the same year, and the painted candy canes, and the red ribbons, and the green paper wreaths. "Oh, my," I said, looking at all of it. "Oh, Mom, just sit down," Jannie said. "You just don't remember, that's all. You sit down and I'll do it."
Since Gladys was the only one in the pageant who had anything to say, she made the most of it: "Hey! Unto you a child is born!" And all the shepherds trembled, sore afraid – of Gladys, mainly, but it looked good anyway.
Why should I have my premises made a scapegoat for administrative incompetence and I don't care who hears me! And it's not just the inconvenience – it's the downright inhumanity that makes me so upset. Like this poor girl from up north – all that long way in such terrible weather, and the baby due any minute.... Well, what do you expect me to do? I haven't a room in the house. I don't know whether I'm on me head or me heels – just look at the place, a madhouse and I'm run off me feet! You'll have to find somewhere else, I just simply can't – oh my, she can't really travel any more, can she? Oh dear, oh dear – Look, would it be all right if I was to put you in the stable?...
"We sent them something on the twenty-second, so they had to think of us. There was no getting around it." "Well, what did we send them?" "I forget – good heavens – I think it was a calendar."
"Only there ought to be a star at the top," the woody's uncle said. "Do you think so?" the woody replied, looking thoughtfully at Moominmamma's red silk rose. "What difference does it make once the idea's right?" "The rose should have been a star," Moominmamma whispered to the others. "But how on earth?..."
The sun is shining, the grass is green, / The orange and palm trees sway. / There’s never been such a day / In Beverly Hills, L. A. / But it’s December the twenty-fourth / And I am longing to be up north...
"It's an ominous present," Suzy said. "Aren't you going to open it?"
And, of course, one of the best lines ever written:
But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.
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