Redtree Times

2013

“If I could work my will,” said Scrooge, indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

“Uncle!” pleaded the nephew.

“Nephew!”—returned the uncle, sternly, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”

“Keep it!” repeated Scrooge’s nephew. “But you don’t keep it.”

“Let me leave it alone then,” said Scrooge. “Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!”

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure that I have always thought of Christmas Time, when it has come round— apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts, freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say God bless it!”

–Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)

Quite morning. Incredibly dark when I got up this morning, even though the sky was clear and stars were shining. It was the kind of dark that makes it seem as though it is something more than an absence of light, that it is an entity with a mass and density. It was so dark that it felt impenetrable, that you could walk into it and it would be like walking into a wall.

I begin every morning in the dark and am comfortable in it but can’t recall this sort of darkness. It made me a bit uneasy, actually, and had me wishing that the morning light would break through the trees soon.

Uneasy or not, I know the light will come soon. Always has and always will. I guess there’s a lesson in there somewhere, but it will have to wait for another day.

Let’s just leave it here, along with the passage from A Christmas Carol, and get to some Sunday Morning Music. This is a holiday song focusing on light, so it could well apply to the darkness that has descended on my woods this early morning. This is another song from the fruitful collaboration of Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, The Light of Christmas Day. I’ve been trying to share holiday music in recent days that probably doesn’t get a lot of airplay and this might be another that falls into that category.