Round pebbles, poetry, orange-peel hat on my knee

[sovay]

This year my mother and I bought a dark-patterned wrapping paper which seems to show hares and holly and green branches and birds intermingled and we have thought from the first time we saw it that there are foxes, but whenever we look we can't see them.

Ten years ago I found out that the 1935 A Tale of Two Cities was a Christmas release, hence its otherwise inexplicably invented—albeit charming rather than saccharine—scene of accidentally collecting Carton for midnight mass in the middle of his pub crawl, which in high school introduced me to "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" and all these years later seems to have fixed a slightly foxed Ronald Colman as one of my Christmas-ish icons.

It snowed thinly again this morning and is staying crust-crunching cold.

Merry Erev Christmas.

Comments

[sovay]

Merry Christmas! What beautiful ecologically-suggestive wrapping paper.

Likewise and thank you! I saw it and pounced.

I don't think I knew that was Sydney Carton in your icon, aww.

It's a production still I found in 2014 when I finally decided to make an icon of the character. I had originally planned to use a somewhat more romantic shot of Colman, but was too charmed by discovering one where he actually looked as though he'd been awake all night and was still mildly hungover about it. I imprinted on the character in tenth grade despite the best efforts of our English teacher that year to wreck any classic literature we were assigned.

I always associate 'God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen' with Victorian Christmas stuff for some reason, so it's appropriate for Dickens, but perhaps would seem a bit strange in the French Revolution setting.

In its defense, it is sung in London! I think it exploded in popularity during the nineteenth century. The internet informs me it rates a name-check in A Christmas Carol.

[regshoe]

I read the novel at a similar age and found Sydney definitely one of the more compelling characters in the various Dickens books I read around then :D (which also included A Christmas Carol, so that may be where I remember the song from)