And those who can remember when the night sky was a tapestry

[sovay]

In the afternoon there was eggnog, in the evening there was roast beef, and after dinner with my parents and my husbands and nineweaving, there was plum pudding with an extremely suitable amount of brandy on fire.



At the end of a battering year, it was a small and a nice Christmas. There was thin frozen snow on the ground. In addition to the traditional and necessary socks and a joint gift with spatch of wooden kitchen utensils to replace our archaically cracked spoons, I seem to have ended up with a considerable stack of books including Robert Macfarlane's Ghostways: Two Journeys in Unquiet Places (2020), Monique Roffey's The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020), and the third edition of Oakes Plimpton's Robbins Farm Park, Arlington, Massachusetts: A Local History from the Revolutionary War to the Present (1995/2007) with addenda as late as 2014 pasted into the endpapers by hand, a partly oral history I'd had no idea anyone had ever conducted of a place I have known for sledding and star-watching and the setting off of model rockets since childhood. The moon was a ice-white crescent at 18 °F. After everything, as we were driving home, I saw the unmistakable flare of a shooting star to the northwest, a stray shot of the Ursids perhaps after all.

Comments

[regshoe]

Oh, wow! Our pudding flamed very nicely, but yours definitely beats it :D

[sovay]

Oh, wow! Our pudding flamed very nicely, but yours definitely beats it

Thank you so much! I still bet yours was great.

[mrissa]

I said when unwrapping my gifts that nothing says Christmas like the English Civil War but Robert Macfarlane may be equally, if differently, festive.

[asakiyume]

Isn't that the Aurora Borealis, localized in your parents' house? It shimmers very aurora-like! The Mermaid of Black Conch sounds **great**--might have to read that myself. (Robert Macfarlane too, but it's his rivers one that's on my list first.) And a partly oral, hyperlocal history? Wonderful! Not to mention being blessed by a shooting star.

We went for a walk on Christmas night and I swear the fat crescent moon got lower and brighter as we walked, like it was a boat trying to swing in close to offer us a lift.

[aurumcalendula]

Ooh! (seconding the comment that the pudding looks like a mini Aurora Borealis) That sounds like a lovely time!

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

My night sky is no longer as vivid as the sky once was, but it still plenty to make city friends go "wow" and stare at it. This year we got a great look at an aurora with faintly shifting patches of different colors. :D

[thistleingrey]

I've never actually seen pudding aflame! Very impressive.

[sovay]

I've never actually seen pudding aflame! Very impressive.

Thank you! It is then carried to the table, flaming, in state, while everyone else sings "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" in a sort of intramural wassail.