Family, friends and faith pull us ever homeward during
this sacred season that closes the calendar year.
All of us have a home place: it may be the place of your
birth, or where forebears dwelled, where you were raised, or a place where
the gravitational pull of landscape or culture has drawn you firmly into its
orbit.
More than anything, a home place is where you feel
welcome and wanted, connected and content.
Of course, no home place is complete without family and
friends close at hand. Thankfully, the perfect antidote to a world ailing
with conflict and confusion is a home place reunion with loved ones,
especially during this time of year when mantels, dining tables, living
rooms and light posts across the land are adorned with symbols of our
various faith traditions.
In our closing issue each year, we feature favorite
passages from treasured works of the season. So this holiday season, as you
prepare to decorate, travel to, or merely reminisce about your home place,
we send our very best wishes for peace and prosperity in 2016.
Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter
morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old
house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there
is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in
front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.
A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen
window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a
summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but,
due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her
face is remarkable � not unlike Lincoln�s, craggy like that, and tinted by
sun and wind; but it is delicate, too, finely boned, and her eyes are
sherry-colored and timid.
�Oh
my,� she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, �it�s fruitcake
weather!�
� Truman Capote, �A Christmas Memory,� from Selected
Writings of Truman Capote, 1956.
We sleep, and at length awake to the still reality of a
winter morning. The snow lies warm as cotton or down upon the window sill;
the broadened sash and frosted panes admit a dim and private light, which
enhances the snug cheer within. The stillness of the morning is impressive.
The floor creaks under our feet as we move toward the window to look abroad
through some clear space over the fields. We see the roofs stand under their
snow burden. From the eaves and fences hang stalactites of snow, and in the
yard stand stalagmites covering some concealed core. The trees and shrubs
rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences,
we see fantastic forms stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky
landscape, as if Nature had strewn her fresh designs over the fields by
night as models for man�s art.
� Henry David Thoreau, �A Winter Walk,� 1843.
Around Christmastime the
kitchens of Freetown, Virginia, would grow fragrant with the baking of
cakes, fruit puddings, cookies, and candy. Exchanging gifts was not a custom
at that time, but we did look forward to hanging our stockings from the
mantel and finding them filled on Christmas morning with tasty �imported�
nuts from Lahore�s, our favorite hard candies with the cinnamon-flavored red
eye, and oranges whose special Christmas aroma reached us at the top of the
stairs. And for us four girls, there would also be little celluloid dolls
with movable arms and legs that we so loved, and new paper dolls with their
fascinating clip-on wardrobes. But mainly getting ready for Christmas meant
preparing all kinds of delicious foods that we would enjoy with our families
and friends during the days between Christmas Eve and New Year�s Day.
� Edna Lewis, �Joy in Freetown,� from The Taste of
Country Cooking, 1976.
With a dramatic sweep of her arm, the screen would be
pushed aside and they would parade into the darkened living room where, at
one end, the tree glowed with color, lighting the familiar walls with an
unreal and transient radiance � They entered the living room, stood for a
moment silently, looking, each seeing in his own way what the crowd had seen
when they looked at the great tree at Rockefeller Center, each sensing
vaguely that he had stepped into a magic circle from which the harshness of
life had been debarred and only its warmth and tenderness admitted.
� Edward Streeter, Merry Christmas, Mr. Baxter, 1956.
