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

[pameladean]

I think I saw that movie long ago. I already had a profound crush on Sydney Carton from reading the book over and over, and a lot of juvenilia had him as a character inspiration before Hamlet for a time usurped his place.

I am agog at your wonderful paper. Averted-vision foxes!

P.

[sovay]

I think I saw that movie long ago. I already had a profound crush on Sydney Carton from reading the book over and over, and a lot of juvenilia had him as a character inspiration before Hamlet for a time usurped his place.

My mother showed it to me as an antidote to English class. It is strikingly unfaithful to the text at multiple points and I love it, as I also managed, despite English class, to love great swathes of the text. "Going home stealthily and unsteadily to his lodgings, like a dissipated cat."

(I had on the whole a positive experience of literature in high school, but one year really tried to make up for it.)

I am agog at your wonderful paper. Averted-vision foxes!

We kept saying, "Pass the fox paper!" and then remembering there are apparently none.