Posts of Christmas Past

I've been stretched a bit thin in real life this year, and except for the Harry Potter Project, to which I made a commitment and to which certain well-disciplined project partners/friends keep me accountable, there's not been much new material on the blog since the summer.  It's a real pity to me and something I intend to improve in the new year.

In the meantime, I thought I'd gather together all the Christmas and wintery posts and link them--some of them you may have forgotten in a year's time or never read them, if you're new to SSiG.  Seasons each have their own distinctive magic, and the winter season's is sharp and clear.  A perfect time for internal scrutinizing and looking back on things in the ice-blue distance.

I wrote on the theme of winter dreaming last night:

. . . I do dream of white Christmases, and dreaming is memory--at least, they must come from the same place in the soul.  And even though I now live in a sub-tropic clime, I'm a child of Midwestern winters, and the hard, warm snow that fell on flat, dry grass, lending its porcelain silence to a drab and weary backdrop. 

I remember waking in the dark of early morning, breath held.  Even if no word came from the television that school was canceled due to snow-blocked roads, I still thrilled to step out into the white-and-black world.  Snow makes stars sharper, somehow.  I'd bundle up and go out early to wait on the corner of the street.  My feet were the first imprint; it was surreal, like crossing finest sand on a beach no human soul had touched on another planet.  Everything was suddenly closer, the world made smaller; you know, sharper, like when you twist your camera lens and everything comes into focus, so that you can see each tiny grain of glass.   As if the light reflected drew the sky down to gaze at her own reflection.   I stood there for ten, fifteen--twenty minutes well before I had to; before the other children--noisy, shoving and joking, oblivious--came out to wait with me; before the squat bus lumbered over the road toward us, and broke my shimmering bubble of infinite yet self-contained existence. 

I mean, there's more than one reason it's called a snowglobe.

That's a taste of where I write from when I write about this lightless season; though it really doesn't lack light of all.

On the Snow Queen, Part I

On the Snow Queen, Part II

Merry, Magic Christmas

Father Christmas as Fairy Tale

On the Snow Queen, Part III

Snow Apple

Enjoy.  And thanks for sticking with me.

What are some of your favorite thoughts on winter?