"Pay attention to the world." -- Susan Sontag
 

Six Days to Christmas: It’s the Little Things!

From “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” in Thankfully: The Christmas Guest and Other Poems by Helen Steiner Rice:

We cannot all be famous
or be listed in ‘Who’s Who,’
But every person great or small
has important work to do,
For seldom do we realize
the importance of small deeds
Or to what degree of greatness
unnoticed kindness leads —

For it’s not the big celebrity
in a world of fame and praise,
But it’s doing unpretentiously
in undistinguished ways
The work that God assigned to us,
unimportant as it seems,
That makes our task outstanding
and brings reality to dreams —

So do not sit and idly wish
for wider, new dimensions
Where you can put in practice
your many ‘Good Intentions’ —

But at the spot God placed you
begin at once to do
Little things to brighten up
the lives surrounding you
….

For if everybody brightened up
the spot on which they’re standing
By being more considerate
and a little less demanding,
This dark old world would very soon
eclipse the ‘Evening Star’
If everybody Brightened Up
the Corner Where They Are!












Seven Days to Christmas: When Nature Does the Decorating

From “Winter” by Robert Merrill Bartlett in Prayers and Poems for Christmas,ย edited by Nancy J. Skarmeas:

As the snow falls gently
against my window, I give thanks,
O divine Spirit, for the cycle
of the seasons and the ever-changing
beauty of the universe….

A mantle of purity is spread over this drab earth,
and the evergreens bow humbly
in their vestments of white. The noises
of men cease; a new stillness envelopes
the world, and Thy voice speaks to me
through the elements….

As I look upon this beauty, I think
of Thee as the source from which it all comes.
Give me faith to believe that the order
which sustains the ever-varying pageantry
of nature will also uphold me….

From “Holly and Ivy” in Christmas: A Short History from Solstice to Santa by Andy Thomas:

“The carol ‘The Holly and the Ivy,’ the words of which started to appear in the early 1800s, solidifies the Christian connotations of these plants, with the holly representing Christโ€™s crown of thorns and the ivy representing the Virgin Mary. But in medieval Europe, holly and ivy, along with other evergreens (often rosemary), were seen as especially sacred, or at least they were signs of good luck long before the famous carol came along.

“As vegetation that was boldly flourishing in the cold, dark time of the year, when so much else was stark and dormant, this kind of foliage, when brought into the home, offered hope to the winter weary in the Northern Hemisphere. It reminded people that if nature could push through the harsh times and thrive again, so could they. In another echo back to Roman times, when wreaths were used as signs of victory and status, the plants would often be fashioned into circles by medieval families, decorated, and hung on doors or laid on tables.”

From “The Seven Poor Travelers” in A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings by Charles Dickens:

“[The] mists began to rise in the most beautiful manner, and the sun to shine; and as I went on through the bracing air, seeing the hoar-frost sparkle everywhere, I felt as if all Nature shared in the joy of the great Birthday….”












Eight Days to Christmas: Red and Green (and Gold)

From “Christmas Butterfly” by Susan R. Ide in Christmas: The Annual of Christmas Literature and Art, edited by Randolph E. Haugan:

Christmas is a butterfly unfolding
From winter’s chrysalis. Out of the black
And white December harshness flash colors,
Soft fragilities of wings. Icy streets
Shine red and green and gold. Scarlet and pink
Poinsettias glow by hearths. Angels abound.


Christmas is a butterfly unfolding
From the cold human heart. Out of the bleak
Preoccupation with our private woes
And wants, out of the tedium of routines,
There springs the wish to give and to forgive.
Love once again believes and hopes all things.
That Christmas comes each year is proof enough:
Miracles of birth and rebirth still occur.

From “The Christmas Life” by Wendy Cope in Christmas Poems, chosen by Gaby Morgan:

Bring in a tree, a young Norwegian spruce,
Bring hyacinths that rooted in the cold.
Bring winter jasmine as its buds unfold —
Bring the Christmas life into this house.

Bring red and green and gold, bring things that shine,
Bring candlesticks and music, food and wine.
Bring in your memories of Christmas past.
Bring in your tears for all that you have lost.

Bring in the shepherd boy, the ox and ass,
Bring in the stillness of an icy night,
Bring in a birth, of hope and love and light.
Bring the Christmas life into this house.













Nine Days to Christmas: Silver (and Blue) and Gold

From “The Box of Magic” by Malorie Blackman in Christmas Stories: A Collection of Festive Tales, chosen by Lauren Buckland:

“Peter had spent all afternoon searching and searching for the perfect present for his mum and dad. Something that would stop them quarrelling for just five minutes. Something that would make Christmas the way it used to be, with smiles and songs and happiness in every corner of the house….

โ€œBut all the searching had been for nothing. Peter didn’t have that much money to begin with and all the things he could afford, he didn’t want. All the gifts he could afford looked so cheap and tacky that Peter knew they would fall apart about ten seconds after they were handled. What was he going to do? He had to buy something and time was running out….

โ€œThen he caught sight of it out of the corner of his eye. The medium-sized sign above the door said ‘The Christmas Shop’ in spidery writing. The small shop window was framed with silver and gold tinsel and a scattering of glitter like mini stars. At the bottom of the window, fake snow had been sprayed. It looked so much like the real thing that had it been outside the window instead of inside, Peter would’ve been sure it was real snow. A single Christmas tree laden with fairy lights and baubles and yet more tinsel stood proudly in the exact centre of the window….

โ€œHe wondered why he’d never seen it before…. Peter looked up and down the street. The few other shops in the same row as the Christmas Shop were all boarded up. Unexpectedly, the shop door opened. A tall portly man with a white beard and a merry twinkle in his eyes stood in the doorway….”

From “Christmas Tree” by Laurence Smith in The Oxford Treasury of Christmas Poems, edited by Michael Harrison and Christopher Stuart-Clark:

Star over all
Eye of the night
Stand on my tree
Magical sight
Green under frost
Green under snow
Green under tinsel
Glitter and glow
Appled with baubles
Silver and gold
Spangled with fire
Warm over cold.











Ten Days to Christmas: Peace in the Village

From “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” in A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings by Charles Dickens:

“On the hill-side beyond the shapelessly-diffused town, and in the quiet keeping of the trees that gird the village-steeple, remembrances are cut in stone, planted in common flowers; growing in grass, entwined with lowly brambles around many a mound of earth. In town and village, there are doors and windows closed against the weather, there are flaming logs heaped high, there are joyful faces, there is healthy music of voices….

“Be all ungentleness and harm excluded from the temples of the Household Gods, but be those remembrances admitted with tender encouragement! They are of the time and all its comforting and peaceful reassurances; and of the history that reunited even upon earth the living and the dead; and of the broad beneficence and goodness that too many men have tried to tear to narrow shreds.”

From “Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid” in A Christmas Story by Jean Shepherd

“Early December saw the first of the great blizzards of that year. The wind howling down out of the Canadian wilds a few hundred miles to the north had screamed over frozen Lake Michigan and hit Hohman, laying on the town great drifts of snow and long, story-high icicles, and subzero temperatures where the air cracked and sang. Streetcar wires creaked under caked ice and kids plodded to school through forty-five-mile-an-hour gales, tilting forward like tiny furred radiator ornaments, moving stiffly over the barren, clattering ground.

“Preparing to go to school was about like getting ready for extended Deep-Sea Diving. Longjohns, corduroy knickers, checkered flannel Lumberjack shirt, four sweaters, fleece-lined leatherette sheepskin coat, helmet, goggles, mittens with leatherette gauntlets and a large red star with an Indian Chiefโ€™s face in the middle, three pair of sox, high-tops, overshoes, and a sixteen-foot scarf wound spirally from left to right until only the faint glint of two eyes peering out of a mound of moving clothing told you that a kid was in the neighborhood….

“Downtown Hohman was prepared for its yearly bacchanalia of peace on earth and good will to men. Across Hohman Avenue and State Street, the gloomy main thoroughfares — drifted with snow that had lain for months and would remain until well into Spring, ice encrusted, frozen drifts along the curbs — were strung strands of green and red Christmas bulbs, and banners that snapped and cracked in the gale. From the streetlights hung plastic ivy wreaths surrounding three-dimensional Santa Claus faces.”


Ho! Ho! Hello!

If you decorate for the holidays, you’ve likely had this experience: After extracting the packed-up boxes of Christmas globbles from the attic or closet you squoze them into ten or eleven months ago, you begin to open them and exclaim, over and over again: “Oh, I forgot about THESE!” In case you didn’t know, this is part of the job assigned by the universe to Christmas decorations: to dim your off-season memory so many things you come across the following year seem new, and delightful, once again.

Something similar happens when I start thinking about the “Days to Christmas” series of posts I first started six years ago, originally as a way of learning more about photography by experimenting with the colors and lights of the Christmas season. Last year, I explained the project in some detail; see Ten Days to Christmas: Peace from 2023 if you’d like to read more about it and how each year I would add some new whatnot to my photography kit just to explore its use it with my Christmas project.

This year, I didn’t buy anything new specifically to shoot for Christmas; but imagine my surprise to discover how useful a variable neutral density filter (that I purchased to control bright sunlight when photographing flowers outdoors) could be when photographing Christmas decorations. You see, I often add supplemental lighting with these Christmas scenes, but that lighting also brightens up backgrounds too much and ruins the mood. With a variable ND filter, though, I can reduce the overall lighting as much as I want then expose the image accordingly; and the actual effect is to keep most of the light I need on the subject but darken the background and create that little sense of Christmas mystery. The photos in this post — the first three inspired by the peaceful but “shapelessly-diffused town” described by Dickens above — were taken with that technique, which enabled me to keep the subject bright and well-focused with accurate colors, while keeping the backgrounds soft and shadowy.

Thanks for taking a look!