Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve: a time of candlelight and angelic voices, of frost and firesides, a day that always seems faintly enchanted. I like its cold and pensive quiet ever so much more than the familial flurry of Christmas day. More so than New Years, it is the time I reflect on the year that’s ending and the one that’s to come.

When we were younger, my sister and I would make our way to the living room after our parents had gone to sleep, dressed in Victorian nightgowns and nightcaps, and red stockings, our way lit by a single candle. We would sit beneath the tree and listen to medieval carols and the haunting Pas de Deux from the Nutcracker, and speak in whispers about the melancholy joy of getting older, even as we sat enraptured by the beauty of our timeless childhood ritual.