I think this time of year is full of longing. Even when childhood excitement or belief is lost, I still feel a sense of expectancy and anticipation in it. As a teenager I remember the holidays seeming a long time not to see a beloved boy except for snatched glances or conversations after Midnight Mass.

Perhaps the feeling is rooted in the year itself – that ancient urge to light the darkness that is so central to all faiths but a lighting that also makes us aware of the darkness too. This year, that darkness makes the light seem especially fragile. With so much suffering in the world and on our screens daily, I think we have a heightened sense of how precious and delicate our lives are, how easily comfort can be taken away, how for so many a home is not something to be taken for granted. We think of, all of those on journeys who find they are experiencing the ‘cold coming’ of Eiot’s Magi,

“Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.”

Claire Keegan’s These Small Things provides one of the best descriptions I’ve ever read of winter and Christmas in a small Irish town and, like A Christmas Carol it is a book I will now make a ritual of reading every year at this time for its own distinctly Irish message of someone who comes to keep Christmas in his heart all year round,

‘It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything Furlong thought.’

It is also a time to think of those we have lost – perhaps especially since it is a time of ritual and when someone is suddenly missing from those rituals, they are paradoxically very present to us. Here is a poem that deals with this. I wish you a very Happy Christmas and invite you to write about your memories of the Christmases of your past too.

The House at Christmas

It’s wide dark eyes –

the picture windows of a 60s bungalow –

reflect rooms in black lakes

cold and mirrored as though slick

with tears and ice.

Early, before the day dies,

stark skies will light them,

black trees against the yellows

and a fierce fire sunken

beyond the mountains.

Inside lamps blind and still the fear.

This is a house full of secrets and

surprises.

One year my father rose in the dawn to

assemble

a green wrought-iron swing

he somehow dug into frozen ground

so that we’d find it in the morning

poised and ready.

The tree goes in the sitting room where

the piano is. All sound is softened

by thick carpet under our feet,

red velvet deep in the piano’s workings,

green felt around the record player’s lid.

The needle dropping into a groove

whispers.

The piano is a Bechstein

bought with his first earnings as a young

teacher

its ebony frame scandalously shaved

to fit an alcove and on it

a book of carols for children

ordered all the way from Boosey and

Hawkes

in London with inked illustrations

in Christmas reds and greens

from which I’ll learn to play

We three kings of Orient are

Bearing gifts we traverse afar

Moor and mountain, field and fountain

Following yonder star

and the moors, mountains and stars

become those we see from our windows.

The coloured lights of the tree reflect

the eyes of other houses across the river

and in the slats of glass in the china

cabinet

the tree is mirrored in an infinite parade

of colour

that we wait for every year and love.

All the rest of the year we know

this secret of light is there

and the room seems to hold

the smell of the tree.

On Christmas Eve, my father disappears

on a mission to the village at odd hours,

with parcels or bottles of mineral

and we somehow know

not to ask where he goes.

There is only one warm room

where everyone gathers to watch

the Two Ronnies or Morecombe and Wise

and I like to drift

into the empty cold of other rooms,

that seem more beautiful than usual,

poised still and silent,

like sets for dramas yet to come,

refreshing after the artificial heat

the clarity of their cold a place to think

of new beginnings but with life

noisy and warm nearby.

And now

when I think of my father

at Christmas

the time of year he loved

I imagine him wandering

such stilled cold rooms

while we, the living, laugh so near.