For Christmastime

Yule is nigh, and so are the familiar celebrations. The straw goat burning in the whipping cold, the yule log, the gathering of pinecones on a snowy weekend stroll through the close woods and trying to find the largest one, one that will hold every paper wish for the coming year. The music, the singing, the ghost stories, and my Nana’s hot wassail and platters of nuts and dried fruit. I am trying to paint myself a picture of the Christmases I used to know. Perhaps, so I will never forget them, to solidify them on the eternal web of my digital footprint.

Edvard Munch’s Snow Falling on the Lane has always captured me in a way that is reminiscent of that childhood. Fluid and obscure, vivid in colour, a smoky surrealism. It is alive, and yet it is serene and evocative of wind in the bare trees; the colours of a dense orange candy bread, cut into slices beside the open fridge with eggnog, thick and creamy, hot in chubby hands at Nana’s home. Hands that burn from the cold outdoors. An outdoors that darkens with the minute, the second. Two little girls who face the snowy lane after Papa’s maudlin ghost stories, the one about the ghost behind his arm chair in Prague. We were too soon turned out and faced the deceptive dark path home.

Amongst my family, I have never been bid too much support with my beliefs, as truly, I have never been too sure of them. Of course I don’t face hostility, but my mother likes joking that I am a heathen at the dinner parties late when she’s had a few glasses of thick wine, much with a likeness to the colours of Edvard Munch’s painting. And yet, I have found myself in a strange transition period where I am mostly in research for what to do.

I have been confiding in my past for guidance now, as the solstice approaches, as Yule approaches. My grandparents are no longer with me materially, but in spirit I can remember their presence in my life. I must find a way to practice what I believe in; to worship the Mother of the Night of Wintertide and let our mother, the Earth, know that I think of and honour her constantly this season.

Oh well, I’ve been biding my time. With school it’s been easy to let it all pass quickly, the celebrations are so near and I’ve felt more disconnected from them than ever. I’ll figure something out.

Merry Part, Merry Christmas and God Jul,

Row