among the rush and pitter-patter and all.
It always seems such a mixing of this world and the next
-- but that after all is the idea!"
~ British mystic ~ Evelyn Underhill (1875 - 1941) ~
~ Solstice Sliver Moon ~
~ The Supermoon on New Year's Night ~
~ Moonrise on January 2nd ~
Gave a luster of midday to objects below . . . "
If I want my Christmas to include a little touch of eternity, all I have to do is watch or read the closing lines of A Child's Christmas in Wales:
Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept. ~Dylan Thomas (1914 - 53)Or the American counterpart; set a couple of decades later, but capturing the same magic of childhood, A Christmas Story, concludes with a similar bedtime reverie, the boys tucked under their blankets with their new toys, the snow falling outside the window:
That Christmas would live in our memories . . . All was right with the world. Next to me in the blackness lay my oiled blue-steel beauty [the Red Ryder BB Gun], the greatest Christmas gift I had ever received or would ever receive. Gradually I drifted off to sleep, pranging ducks on the wing and getting off spectacular hip shots as I dissolved into nothingness. ~Jean Shepherd (1921 - 99)
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