On Christmas light

We're getting an afternoon's worth of snow flurries and wind chills in the low double digits. Our North Country is looking and feeling Christmasy. Someone we've known for many years, Krista Detor, is broadcasting her Holiday Show. We're watching. We first heard her at an off-campus coffee shop when Daughter Person was an undergraduate. Christmas is a wonderful time for waxing nostalgic as well as making new memories.

snow-covered Christmas lights

Photo by J. Harrington

Much as we generally don't approve of snow, the bare ground had begun to look tired and worn. The lights and greenery on the stoop (see entry 3) look so much more festive when snow covered. There's a 1951 classic "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas," remember?

Speaking of nostalgia and the "good old days," yesterday we came across an old (1996) piece in the New Yorker by Arthur Miller titled Why I Wrote “The Crucible”. Reading it reminded us that humans have long displayed an unfortunate ability to foster madness and insanity and try to act on them. In the spirit of Christmas, we should not let aberrant behavior throw us too far off balance. Christmas is the time of year  to reassess our priorities and set our goals for a new year. It's only eight days until the solstice. That's when the light begins to return. We need to be sure to let it shine.

Toward the Winter Solstice

Timothy Steele - 1948-

Although the roof is just a story high,
It dizzies me a little to look down.
I lariat-twirl the cord of Christmas lights
And cast it to the weeping birch’s crown;
A dowel into which I’ve screwed a hook
Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine
The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs
Will accent the tree’s elegant design.

Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause
And call up commendations or critiques.
I make adjustments. Though a potpourri
Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,
We all are conscious of the time of year;
We all enjoy its colorful displays
And keep some festival that mitigates
The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.

Some say that L.A. doesn’t suit the Yule,
But UPS vans now like magi make
Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves
Are gaily resurrected in their wake;                           
The desert lifts a full moon from the east
And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,
And valets at chic restaurants will soon
Be tending flocks of cars and SUVs.

And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk
The fan palms scattered all across town stand
More calmly prominent, and this place seems
A vast oasis in the Holy Land.
This house might be a caravansary,
The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead
Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces
And ceintures of green, yellow, blue, and red.

Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem
Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;
It’s comforting to look up from this roof
And feel that, while all changes, nothing’s lost,
To recollect that in antiquity
The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
And that, in the Orion Nebula,
From swirling gas, new stars are being born.

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