These days, when Christmas rolls around, I try to resurrect from the cobwebs of memory what I felt when, as a kid, I held both of Baby Jesus and Santa Claus in my mind with seemingly little cognitive contortion. In retrospect, I don’t think I ever fully believed either of them, but let myself pretend that I did. I think that at an age of easy credulity I liked the atmosphere they created. I liked the sentiment of carols and especially some of the great Christmas popular music (I’ll Be Home for Christmas), the smells of pine sap and tallow candles, the wafting of incense and thunderous organ pipes at midnight mass, the crunch of fresh snow underfoot, the flakes floating down in the penumbra of the street lamps on Christmas Eve, and the anticipation of what gifts might be under the Christmas tree on which I had placed with much consideration my favorite decorative ornament. I remember the innocent Christmas’s of my youth fondly. If the nativity narrative and Santa myth required a willing suspension of my incipient disbelief then amen to that memory, all of it aptly catalogued under “fiction.”
Happy Holidays,
Dragon City Journal