Every year on Gregorian Christmas Eve, I write something that appears to resonate with my thoughts and senses about the upcoming festivities: remarkably, though, the more I feel closeted and dimly silent about things this year (nearly everything somehow seems inappropriate and tone-deaf given the horrors happening right now in the world), I also simultaneously acquire this strange insistence that it would not be wrong to say a few words today, against all odds.
This time it feels like I’ve finally earned this version of Christmas—Western, Anglican, not-mine-from-birth, Christmas celebrated by a stranger in her beloved Stepmotherland—and I simply cannot imagine myself not doing so.
Recently I bought two copies of Kenneth Grahame’s classic, The Wind in the Willows: we, L. and I, also watched an old animation from the 80s based on the story. The truth is that I can fully relate to these characters from a silly children’s book now— I am Mole, and also Rat, who are looking through that one little window, “with its blind drawn down,” where “sense of home most pulsated,” and all those little field-mice who
[...] stood in a semicircle, red worsted comforters round their throats, their fore-paws thrust deep into their pockets, their feet jigging for warmth. With bright beady eyes they glanced shyly at each other, sniggering a little, sniffing and applying coat-sleeves a good deal. As the door opened, one of the elder ones that carried the lantern was just saying, "Now then, one, two, three!" and forthwith their shrill little voices uprose on the air, singing one of the old-time carols that their forefathers composed in fields that were fallow and held by frost, or when snow-bound in chimney corners, and handed down to be sung in the miry street to lamp-lit windows at Yule-time.” ©
It's all mine now, for better and not for worse. Merry Christmas: the darkness will fail, and the light will prevail.
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