Holiday Greetings, from Our Table to Yours

Wishing you bright, full tables, happy families being silly after their glasses of wine, warm beds to climb into after evening services, and the prettiest throwback to German paganism that would make St. Boniface shudder that you've ever seen. If necessary, you can always take the advice of Dylan Thomas:

And then, at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly; and the ice cake loomed in the center of the table like a marble grave. Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year.

For several years now, it has been our Christmas tradition, crawling into our warm bed after Midnight Mass, to read two books: the first, "A Child's Christmas in Wales" by Dylan Thomas. The second is the Christmas section from E.B. White's "Writings from the New Yorker: 192-1976," and my Christmas gift to you is a selection therefrom.

Midnight Mass

Everyone has one Christmas he remembers above all others, one blindingly beautiful occasion. Ours is a Christmas Eve, during calf love, when we made the (for us) adventurous pilgrimage to a midnight Mass in a Catholic church. Church-going in our family had always been in the honest gloom of a Protestant Sunday morning, and we must hasten to explain that the purpose of this clandestine night expedition was far from religious; we simply had reason to suspect that if we visited that church at that hour, we would catch a glimpse of our beloved. Snow began to fall at sundown, and fell quietly all evening. The snow, the lateness of the hour, the elaborate mysteries of the Mass (we had never seen the inside of a cathedral before), together with the steady burning vision of the back of Her neck whom we adored, and then the coming out into the snow alone afterward, with the street lamps veiled in white: this indeed was a holy time.

-E.B. White, The New Yorker, 12/26/36