Christmas again...with snow and black ice and lists to put up the chimney. The weans have their own ideas but I have my my own christmas rituals and memories. One was the little savings card my mother used to collect 3d a week to buy my Christmas present. I've still got it. One was a great romantic moment: A kiss from the most beautiful girl I knew, and the girl I loved dearly and in vain for many years, at the top of St Michaels' St in Dumfries- she ran, even, through the snow, leaving big footprints I went out to see the next day, just to make sure they were real. I can see her now, her hair and her smile,though she's long gone. Winter's a funny time; the dead seem closer than ever. What you remember, what you imagine, seems more real when the nights are long and black and icy. Didn't the Gaels call it the Thin Season when the gap between the dead and living was most thin,most penetrable?
I always read A Christmas Carol, the most beautiful Xmas story ever.
"Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. the register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his name to. Old Marley was as dead as a door nail."
