OH, THE WEATHER OUTSIDE . . .
. . . is dretful,
All muggy and buggy and sweatful.
How I pine for 13 below:
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!
It's been a quiet week, as they say on the radio. Well, it hasn't been THAT quiet, but once you've copied out a line like "Her heart leaps up with joy undoubting," there really doesn't seem to be that much left to say, except why, oh why, oh why, oh why can't we sing words that good at a Catholic Mass? But mustn't grumble, as the English say, generally in the course of a great deal of grumbling.
So instead of grumbling about hymnody, I'll settle for grumbling about the weather. I really don't pine for anything like 13 below, but if I had wanted my children to frolic barefoot outside in the last week of Advent, I'd have moved to Australia. We had people in for dinner last night, with the Christmas lights twinkling, the ceiling fans oscillating, and everyone panting in sweaters we all felt we had to wear because in this hemisphere at least you really can't go to a bleak-midwinter party in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt . . . at least I didn't feel compelled also to bear a flaming pudding to the table, in which event I think there might have been a stampede for the door, with people shouting not "Fire!" but "Air!"
We do miss the English Christmas, which is so lively, I think, chiefly because it occurs in the miserable hindquarters of the year, when night falls at three in the afternoon and you're forced to think, if you're given to thinking at all, on the light which shineth in the darkness and which the darkness comprehendeth not, as you plod through said darkness, and also the heretofore unsaid rain and cold and general gloom, on your way from the supermarket with a turkey in your backpack which is going to spend the next week defrosting on the fire escape outside the hallway windows because your refrigerator, roughly the size of the average American pencil case, comprehendeth not the height and depth and breadth of the larger varieties of domestic fowl. The English make merry to stave off the night, with a seemingly endless round of little parties where people stand drinking mulled wine and eating mince pies and, because they're not by and large an outwardly exuberant people, not quite knowing what to do with their happiness -- unless they're unhappy, in which case they feel right at home. All this seemed perfectly meet and right to us. If you're happy and satisfied and the sun is shining and you have everything in this world that you could possibly want, then Christmas on top of all that looks like, well, an inflatable Grinch AND an inflatable penguin AND a snowglobe with a carousel inside AND a gigantic sign that says, "Jesus is the Reason for the Season," all in the same front yard.
Perhaps the happiest Christmases we will ever have were our Christmases in England, in a flat with the bathroom across the frigid stairwell (the neighbors are coming! run for your life!) and battered college-issue chairs and tables and a massive, ugly sideboard whose top someone had tastefully refinished in faux-marble contact paper, and the wind moaning in the front window sashes and the back windows letting in rain, though the stock pot on the fire escape in which the turkey was thawing kept the weather out just fine. In the cold and gloom I went to choir practice; I loaded extra groceries into my backpack and staggered home against the wind; more than once I trudged round the charity shops looking for gifts I could buy with the change I'd hunted out of all our pockets. Meanwhile, we went to people's houses and drank mulled wine and ate mince pies. We went to church swathed in coats and mufflers which we didn't take off till we got home again. Bus drivers and strangers in the street wished us a happy Christmas, and we wished them a happy Christmas back. After Midnight Mass the churchwarden unlimbered himself to the extent of kissing me on the cheek before we all went our separate directions.
It has always been my job, for some reason, on Christmas morning, to go into the room with the Christmas tree and "make sure," before the children are allowed in. I turn on the tree lights and light the candles on the mantel and wait a moment in the lovely illuminated quiet before I open the floodgates. Every Christmas morning of our children's lives has been beautiful, and there has never been a time when I thought, as I lit the candles, that there was anything that I could possibly want beyond what I was doing at that moment. But there was something about those Christmas dawns in England. Outside were the cold and the unrelenting dark. Inside, the rooms were not beautiful, in the way that rooms in Christmas catalogs are beautiful. But the candlelight, and the light of our little tree, glowing warm against the black window -- there is light the darkness cannot comprehend. I saw it revealed then, clear and vivid. And my heart leaped up with joy undoubting.
All muggy and buggy and sweatful.
How I pine for 13 below:
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!
It's been a quiet week, as they say on the radio. Well, it hasn't been THAT quiet, but once you've copied out a line like "Her heart leaps up with joy undoubting," there really doesn't seem to be that much left to say, except why, oh why, oh why, oh why can't we sing words that good at a Catholic Mass? But mustn't grumble, as the English say, generally in the course of a great deal of grumbling.
So instead of grumbling about hymnody, I'll settle for grumbling about the weather. I really don't pine for anything like 13 below, but if I had wanted my children to frolic barefoot outside in the last week of Advent, I'd have moved to Australia. We had people in for dinner last night, with the Christmas lights twinkling, the ceiling fans oscillating, and everyone panting in sweaters we all felt we had to wear because in this hemisphere at least you really can't go to a bleak-midwinter party in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt . . . at least I didn't feel compelled also to bear a flaming pudding to the table, in which event I think there might have been a stampede for the door, with people shouting not "Fire!" but "Air!"
We do miss the English Christmas, which is so lively, I think, chiefly because it occurs in the miserable hindquarters of the year, when night falls at three in the afternoon and you're forced to think, if you're given to thinking at all, on the light which shineth in the darkness and which the darkness comprehendeth not, as you plod through said darkness, and also the heretofore unsaid rain and cold and general gloom, on your way from the supermarket with a turkey in your backpack which is going to spend the next week defrosting on the fire escape outside the hallway windows because your refrigerator, roughly the size of the average American pencil case, comprehendeth not the height and depth and breadth of the larger varieties of domestic fowl. The English make merry to stave off the night, with a seemingly endless round of little parties where people stand drinking mulled wine and eating mince pies and, because they're not by and large an outwardly exuberant people, not quite knowing what to do with their happiness -- unless they're unhappy, in which case they feel right at home. All this seemed perfectly meet and right to us. If you're happy and satisfied and the sun is shining and you have everything in this world that you could possibly want, then Christmas on top of all that looks like, well, an inflatable Grinch AND an inflatable penguin AND a snowglobe with a carousel inside AND a gigantic sign that says, "Jesus is the Reason for the Season," all in the same front yard.
Perhaps the happiest Christmases we will ever have were our Christmases in England, in a flat with the bathroom across the frigid stairwell (the neighbors are coming! run for your life!) and battered college-issue chairs and tables and a massive, ugly sideboard whose top someone had tastefully refinished in faux-marble contact paper, and the wind moaning in the front window sashes and the back windows letting in rain, though the stock pot on the fire escape in which the turkey was thawing kept the weather out just fine. In the cold and gloom I went to choir practice; I loaded extra groceries into my backpack and staggered home against the wind; more than once I trudged round the charity shops looking for gifts I could buy with the change I'd hunted out of all our pockets. Meanwhile, we went to people's houses and drank mulled wine and ate mince pies. We went to church swathed in coats and mufflers which we didn't take off till we got home again. Bus drivers and strangers in the street wished us a happy Christmas, and we wished them a happy Christmas back. After Midnight Mass the churchwarden unlimbered himself to the extent of kissing me on the cheek before we all went our separate directions.
It has always been my job, for some reason, on Christmas morning, to go into the room with the Christmas tree and "make sure," before the children are allowed in. I turn on the tree lights and light the candles on the mantel and wait a moment in the lovely illuminated quiet before I open the floodgates. Every Christmas morning of our children's lives has been beautiful, and there has never been a time when I thought, as I lit the candles, that there was anything that I could possibly want beyond what I was doing at that moment. But there was something about those Christmas dawns in England. Outside were the cold and the unrelenting dark. Inside, the rooms were not beautiful, in the way that rooms in Christmas catalogs are beautiful. But the candlelight, and the light of our little tree, glowing warm against the black window -- there is light the darkness cannot comprehend. I saw it revealed then, clear and vivid. And my heart leaped up with joy undoubting.
7 comments:
You do make me laugh:), hoping it snows for you soon.
Well, now it's cold. And our furnace is broken. So perhaps my repost timing here was not the most felicitous . . . Or maybe it's just Opposite Day.
But day before yesterday WAS warm!
We are having a snow storm right now. Would you like me to direct it more toward the south? :)
Maybe not today . . .
We've got our first snow of the year, too.
And I gave a copy of your book to a friend last night, and we read it out loud with glasses of wine. :)
Bless you!
And snow would be nice. If it's going to be cold (ish).
Oh I do like this very much. It looks like we might have snow here and that will be a very good thing. We spent today with the front door off its hinges because my brother-in-law is replacing it with a new door that promises to be much more weather tight. But it did seem like rather dreadful timing with occasional snow flurries reminding us that we should have done this any time else in the last four years.
Anyway, I do hope you all have a very lovely Christmas.
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