A Quiet but Fulfilling Christmas

Saturday, December 26, 2020

We are still celebrating the spirit of Christmas, and will be for all of next week, quietly savoring the serenity and reassurance the season can always bring – and this year’s celebration has been a special one.

In this year of masking and distancing because of the pandemic, I noticed, many weeks ago, that Delycia was as serious as ever about celebrating the season with resolve and thoroughness. Early in December, she brought out our traditional Christmas puzzle, set it on the dining room table, and spread out the colorful pieces, announcing, in her spirited way, the start of the Christmas season. It took us maybe 10 days to fit all the pieces together, and I think both of us enjoyed seeing the beautiful winter scene fall into place once again.

She also brought out, at the start of December, two enchanting advent calendars, which she had purchased from a local bookstore, and the next morning she got us started on the daily ceremony of opening a window in the calendars after breakfast. We stayed with the ceremony all month, and it was a sincere pleasure to see the beautiful scenes and pictures open up and come to life each morning.

She also insisted, in her gentle but determined way, that we follow our long-standing tradition of reading aloud Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

And so, early in the month, we began reading the marvelous story in the sunroom after opening the advent calendar windows, and we stayed with it each morning until we finished the story a few days before Christmas.

But, she said we should also watch, not just one film version of the story, but two different versions, which we did, little by little each day, finishing the second one on Christmas Day.

And, she also encouraged us to follow our tradition of watching the film called “The Snowman”, a beautiful and deeply moving story for Christmas lovers of all ages.

Off by herself now and then, she read, once again, one of her all-time favorite Christmas stories, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever – a story she often read to her son when he was a young lad.

In addition to all this, she organized the purchase and decoration of our Christmas tree (with just a little help from me), set up lovely lights and candles around our windows, prepared a pot of paper whites to bloom perfectly in our sunroom all month, and planned and prepared an absolutely flawless Christmas feast.