I offer my apologies in advance to those of you who may not celebrate Christmas. I’m afraid I’m a hopeless Christmas romantic and I’m about to indulge in some happily sentimental recollections and musings.
But first, let me say what I’m not sentimental about. It is not about over the top Christmas displays or starting Christmas on November first. It is not about spending lots of money on gifts. It is not about elevator type Christmas music. It’s not about children’s shows and movies created expressly to have kiddos clamoring to buy all kinds of branded stuff. It’s not even about gifts given to me, although I have no objection to them.
No, what I love is the feeling and wonder Christmas evokes. I was lucky enough to have a mom who wove a long lasting holiday tapestry of good smells, traditions, images, stories, and wonder in my mind and it has stuck with me. It isn’t about the religious aspects of it although music, stars, wise men, incense, and the rest are inextricably intertwined in my memories. It’s a feeling that’s a mix of memories, imagination, and associations.
It’s the rich spicy smell of Williamsburg bayberry candles Mom burned almost twenty-four seven from Thanksgiving through the new year from the time I was twelve until a few years ago when they stopped making them. They had a unique fragrance I have never found in any other bayberry candle. We were heartbroken when we learned they weren’t making them any more. How would Christmas be Christmas without the faint traces of bayberry smell that clung to our hair and clothes and seemed to permeate the furniture and draperies?
It’s the vivid imagery like this contained in one of my favorite Christmas books, Lanterns Across the Snow by Susan Hill, about a little English girl in the early 1900s waiting impatiently for Christmas to come:
“It had been snowing all day. It lay, softly piled over the earth and outlining the curve of each grey gravestone … the ledge outside her window was fat with snow. The church roof, the church porch, the bushes, and the yew trees that stood, like statues in skirts, were soft with snow, and the sky was grey as a wolf’s coat, and still it went on snowing.”
Whew, in my imagination I’m there, watching the feathery flakes drift to the ground. I wish I was there, oh to have a snowy holiday season, I long for it!
And then, it’s the marvelment (yes, a word I made up, give me a break) of a young boy’s Christmas found in Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales:
“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 … ”
Or, A Child’s Christmas … on the subject of presents:
“There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be tug-o’-warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o’-shanters like patchwork tea cozies and bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shrinking tribes; from aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were mustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us. And pictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles’ pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why.”
