Ghosts of Christmas Past by Carol
Is there anything that can tie us so tightly to our childhoods as Christmas? Childhood memories are especially powerful even though they are often amorphous. The smells, the sounds, the seasonal triggers of memory form a kind of dream world that has little to do with the current Christmas or even with any one of those Christmases now past; it is the accumulation of Yuletide after Yuletide. In fact, the dreamworld never actually arrives; it just tantalizes.
Having grown up in New England where almost every Christmas was white, one memory trigger I don’t have now-a-days is snow. Oh, but it snows in my head whenever I hear the song I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas. Watching snow settling softly over the earth feels a lot like Quaker Meeting. Snowfall quiets the world; tucks it in as for a long winter’s nap; engenders wordless contemplation.
But even without snow, there is the moon. I remember riding home in the backseat of my Dad’s car one December evening, a Christmas tree tied to the roof, as I gazed up at a full moon illuminating the clouds racing across its face. Being out in the dark is a great excitement in a well-regulated childhood and that may be why holiday memories often involve the mystery of nighttime.
Yuletide is also a season for repetition. I never tire of watching some version of Dicken’s Christmas Carol. I love to watch Scrooge’s transformation. Have you noticed that at the end of his encounters with the ghosts he didn’t find religion; he found something even more important; he found a charitable heart. All through his bah-humbug years he must have been silently taking note of Christmas; it is clear that on that Christmas morning that he had already noticed the big goose hanging in the shop window.
Every year we busily prepare ourselves for Christmas, but it comes like a tiny one-horse town we pass on the highway. If you blink you miss it. Unless, of course, you savor the preparation. Preferring, perhaps, to wrap the packages, rather than open them, or, if your family is far away, to box them up for the post office, or finding your Christmas groove addressing all those envelopes for your Christmas card list.
Christmas comes and goes in a flash; and then follows the lull at the end of the year; the days that were no days – off the calendar – in ancient times. That’s what we need: a lull to savor our ghosts. Even Scrooge carried the ghost of his past Christmases somewhere under his crusty exterior and somewhere inside of us we all carry our own ghosts.