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Category: holidays

Candles in the Darkness

Candles in the Darkness

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Some houses have candles in their windows. Others, tasteful white twinkle lights around trees limbs and branches. There are spotlit doors with wreaths. And there are icicle lights, easiest to install if you have a slight overhang, which we do not.

A few years ago people started putting not just one large wreath on the front door, but smaller wreaths on every front-facing window, a holiday-decorating escalation that seems like it would be overkill but can look surprisingly nice when glimpsed from afar.

The house behind us drips in icicle lights and spotlit trees, and the house behind that features a snowman and reindeer and strings of lights shining from tree to tree, giving the place a fiesta feel.

Our own house has colored lights along the roof line, around the door, across the shrubbery and up the lamp post. The window candles are missing in action but should be up soon.

We are, in short, decked out for the season. At least we are until I plug in my hair dryer and blow the fuses (which has been happening far too often lately). But except for these black-outs, our house and the others in Folkstone have become what we need most right now: candles in the darkness.  

Photo of Bull Run Lights Festival: Virginia.org

Bittersweet

Bittersweet

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Labor Day is a bittersweet holiday. While other nations celebrate their workers on the first day of May, we do it on the first Monday of September.  So instead of welcoming the warm weather, we are saying goodbye to it (or good riddance, depending upon your point of view and tolerance level).

The fact is, if you love summer, as I do, you may not be a big fan of Labor Day. It always makes me think of the last jump in the pool when I was a kid, my parents saying, “OK. But this is absolutely the last one. We have to go home. You have school in the morning.”

School in the morning. A line guaranteed to chill the soul of any child, a phrase that still, decades later, makes my stomach do a little somersault.

As the years pass more quickly, though, and as each Labor Day (and Memorial Day, 4th of July and other holiday) leads more surely to the next fete in the lineup, I’ve come to see the first Monday in September as a bellwether in reverse. If summer is good, Labor Day is not so bad. If summer has been summer — hot, sticky, filled with enough swimming and biking and eating of ice cream bars — then I reluctantly, but without reservation, say farewell.

Christmas Revels

Christmas Revels

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One special holiday memory — which I’m writing about only now because I finally pulled the photos from my camera to my computer — was when the Christmas Eve carolers came to our house. We heard them first, when they were across the street, and lured them over here.

Our neighbor Nancy led the others with her lovely soprano, but every one of the singers held his or her own. They crooned “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “White Christmas” and other selections, with plenty of whooping and hollering and toasting in between. (Conveniently, they carried their own wine glasses.)

Some of us stepped outside and joined them. All we lacked were the funny hats. But we knew the words, and we had the spirit. And we remember an earlier time on our street, when there were bonfires in the meadow and progressive New Year’s dinners. A time of greater camaraderie and cheer. The carolers made it seem as if those days were back.

After the revelers traipsed off to the next house my Dad turned to me and said, “That’s all I need. That made Christmas for me.” I had to agree with him.

The Day After

The Day After

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The recycling bin is overflowing, the wrapping paper stowed away. You can see the living floor again. Which is to say that the hurricane that is Christmas has roared through our house. In its place is a sudden calm that I try to interpret as peace.

Outside a gentle rain is falling. I just walked through it. I didn’t mind that the drops were dripping down my face. I welcomed the cool air, the sodden smell.

Christmas Day is over. Now comes the hard part.

An Appreciation

An Appreciation

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Our old house has seen better days. The siding is dented, the walkway is cracked, the yard is muddy and tracked with Copper’s paw prints. Inside is one of the fullest and most aromatic trees we’ve ever chopped down. Cards line the mantel, the fridge is so full it takes ten minutes to find the cream cheese. Which is to say we are as ready as we will ever be. The family is gathering. I need to make one more trip to the grocery store.

This morning I thought about a scene from one of my favorite Christmas movies, one I hope we’ll have time to watch in the next few days. In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Jimmy Stewart has just learned he faces bank fraud and prison, and as he comes home beside himself with worry, he grabs the knob of the bannister in his old house — and it comes off in his hand. He is exasperated at this; it seems to represent his failures and shortcomings.

By the end of the movie, after he’s been visited by an angel, after his family and friends have rallied around him in an unprecedented way, after he’s had a chance to see what the world would have been like without him — he grabs the bannister knob again. And once again, it comes off in his hand. But this time, he kisses it. The house is still cold and drafty and in need of repair. But it has been sanctified by friendship and love and solidarity.

Christmas doesn’t take away our problems. But it counters them with joy. It reminds us to appreciate the humble, familiar things that surround us every day, and to draw strength from the people we love. And surely there is a bit of the miraculous in that.

Photo: Flow TV

A Ritual

A Ritual

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“Here, Celia, you usually like to hang this one, right?” said Claire last night, handing her sister a bright pink high heel slipper ornament with glitter and feathers.

“I remember when I got this ornament,” Celia said. “It was one of those parties where you exchange gifts and people can take them from you and I wanted this one so bad.” And she got it.

Meanwhile, Suzanne found her cello ornament and attached it to a heavy branch while Claire hunted for her “Baby’s First Christmas” ornament.

Decorating the tree is a holiday ritual with little courtesies and observances I didn’t even realize we had until we did them all over again last night. Each one is precious.

At points last evening I found myself floating at the edge of the hubub, as Tom, the girls and their friends laughed and talked and decked out our full, fragrant fir tree (which, we all agree, is one of the most beautiful trees ever). I wanted to be enough on the edge of things to be aware that I was part of them. But I also wanted to be in the moment because such moments are rare. So I busied myself stuffing tissue back into the ornament boxes and carrying them downstairs. Even from our storage room I could hear the laughter — it was as clear and silvery as a Christmas bell.

Photo: wallpaperhd.org

Christmas in Miniature

Christmas in Miniature

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Yesterday at lunch I walked to the Botanical Gardens to see the garden train display. The trains were cute — and the children there to see them were even cuter — but what captivated me most were the replicas of the Capitol, Supreme Court and other monuments and presidential homes made of acorns, pine cone scales, mosses, lichen and grapevine tendrils.

It was a magical, miniature world, full of “fairy flats,” “critter condos” and other whimsical structures. It made me want to drink a shrinking potion and clamber right in. It made me want to be a kid again.

But the beauty and wit of these tiny structures also reminded me that there are worlds we cannot fathom — and that in itself is something to celebrate.

Photo by Paul Jean. Captured from Roaming the Planet blog.

Full Circle

Full Circle

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Christmas is coming whether we like it or not, so once again we drove west into the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge. Last year we were some of the last customers of the year to cut our tree. Yesterday we were not. It was a sunny noontime when we arrived, more than two full weeks before the big day.

We walked up and down the slope, savoring the view, the scent of the pine and fir, the sound of dogs barking. (Our own dog barks too much to come!)

It was notable, I think, that the lovely tree we finally found was one we’d overlooked in the very beginning. So we had come full circle in our search.

Gratitude

Gratitude

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An e-mail arrives, an e-mail about gratitude. So does inspiration travel in these wireless days. It reminds me of specifics: not just the feast but the pumpkin praline pie at the end of it.

And it reminds me to take inventory. To look up, pay attention, notice the trees outlined against a blue sky, the mountains that rise behind them.

Sometimes gratitude wells up unbidden. A glance, an aroma, and it floods the being. Other times it must be coaxed as a flame is coaxed, first the spark, then the kindling, finally the log and the blaze. It will roar again, this fire. All it needs is time and fuel.

Morning Commute

Morning Commute

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Until the Viking warrior sat down across from me on Metro, I was planning to write about how there are now 7 billion people alive in this world. I had my head down in the Express, my mind riffing on population growth, limited resources, oil shale and other frightful topics when I looked up and saw someone who looked like this.

The Viking made a self-conscious entrance into the Orange Line train. The horns of his helmet tangled with the Metro railing and his seat mate looked a bit askance. The Viking’s friendly nod and greeting did nothing to brighten the day of his dour fellow commuter. But some of us were chuckling behind our newspapers.

I took the time out from my scary computations ( the world population has doubled in my lifetime and is projected to be 9 billion by 2050) to revel in the fun of the season.

A Viking on Metro. Happy Halloween!