A lone candle flickers in the dark across the room. It is a tall thin white taper.

I lie in silent blackness, mesmerized by the fire. It is Christmas Eve. Through the candlelight, I see into another world.

In the light cast on the wall behind the candle, the shadows move. The shapeless movements change. Their slow dance on the other side of the flame form into indistinct human shapes.

I stare at the flame and am drawn from my side of the room through the aura and into the other side.

I am a child of ten. No longer alone in the world. My parents and brothers gone these many years are home with me.

“You’d better go to bed or Santa won’t stop here tonight,” my mother cautions.

I am so excited for the morning to come. The hours in between seem impossibly distant.

There’s the excitement of visiting older brothers—home for the holidays. One arrived with a new wife. The kitchen is abuzz with Mom’s preparations. Sheets of cookies cool on the oak kitchen counters.

“The cat’s in the tree,” my nearest brother, a decade older, calls from the other room. The family migrates into the living room from various parts of the sprawling oak-paneled home. We are all together once again. Six of us plus the new wife—now a sister. She’s from the south. Annapolis, Maryland.

The cat, Tiger, is invisible somewhere high up on the trunk behind the evergreen branches and needles. But the lights and colored-glass balls move. My oldest brother, tall and impossibly strong, moves and reaches in near the top, almost to the ceiling. He grasps the trunk about a foot below the angel. She is wondrously beautiful in a flowing white gown, perched at the very top.

“How will we get him out?”

The rest of us move closer. Tiger must be able to see out. There’s a low growl and the sound of claws trying to gain purchase on the bark of the trunk amid the maze of branches sticking out in a horizontal maze.

“Tiger! Get down,” I say loudly, trying to express the authority of the child master of his pet.

He doesn’t like the attention nor the precariousness of his position. The whole tree shakes, and it is good my big Marine brother has it in control from the top, lest it all topple over and the glass lights and glass ornaments surely shatter into jagged pieces of colors.

Indeed, one blue ball comes loose from an upper branch and bounces off fronds on its way the floor.

“POP!” It shatters into hundreds of tiny shards. I move toward the tree.

“Don’t touch the glass! I’ll go get a dustpan.” Poor Mom. Just what she needs right now. The distraction of a potential disaster.

I’m on my hands and knees, staring down at the remnants of the ornament. A thousand lights are reflected in the sharp pieces spread onto the wooden floor.

A loud scrabbling frenzy announces the cat’s descent, and he claws down the last couple feet before silently landing upon cat’s paws and fleeing the room a brown striped blur.

I continue to stare at the shattered blue-tinged glass. Each tiny piece a mirror of the dozens of colored lights strung above. If I could look closely enough, I could behold my face looking back at me in many colors upon the faint blue background of the shattered ball.

I am drawn into the tiny lights spread upon the floor below me.

---

Then I am back on the other side of the candle, lying in bed. The three dogs are asleep. Motionless but for their ribs slowly rising and falling.

I should rise and go and blow the light out. What if I fell asleep? Well, there’s nothing there to catch fire. Maybe wax would drip, puddle and cool in a hard white layer on the countertop.

I stare at the soft light flickering on the far wall and the ceiling above.

It is the end of the 24th year after the beginning of the second millennium.

All the memories of all the Christmases in between flood into my mind. Tears well, and a few escape from corners of each eye.

All gone. Parents and brothers. Next summer will mark half a century since dad collapsed, wheezing on the steps.

“What should I do?!” I cried.

He couldn’t answer.

No more family Christmases with everyone there.

---

The candle flickers, and my mind moves toward it.

We are gathered around the table on the breakfast porch. Dad had commandeered the dining with its French doors for his doctor’s office. A tall ebony metal fluoroscope rose in the far corner. The table is lined with four seated brothers, Mom, two wives, now sisters, and one baby nephew only nine years younger than I. Dad is standing behind the tripod set up in the doorway. His 35-mm German Exacta atop it. It has a big convex lens, like a dark eye looking back at us posing.

“Everyone lean in more,” Dad commands.

“Joe, the food’s getting cold,” Mom frets.

He fiddles with the light meter and the f-stop and the aperture and timer before squeezing around one side of the table and taking his seat at the head of the table.

“Everyone smile!”

“POP!” the flashbulb blinds us all for a moment.

Dad rises and returns to the other side of the tripod.

“One more.”

“Joe…” my mother pleads.

Then there’s a frenzy of turkey and gravy and rolls and mashed potatoes.

“You have to try the beans.”

‘No, I don’t,’ I think but don’t make a sound. Nor will I venture into the sweet potatoes with the marshmallows melted atop them.

---

“Thunk.” A log settles atop the bed of coals. The coals had once been a log. It had combusted to a black skeleton of itself, and then the weight of the newer piece of wood caused it to collapse. Hundreds of hot glowing orange throbbing geometric shapes alive on the iron floor of the woodstove.

There is no candle. I would never go to bed with a candle burning. All I can see is the glowing orange eye of the windows on the front of the woodstove.

The house is warm. I’m warmer beneath the sheet, blanket and counterpane. One dog is pressed tight against my thigh. The other two are white and black furry lumps further away on the big bed.

It is past midnight. Christmas Eve now. I will close up the laptop and read til sleep takes me.

“Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.”

---

Christmas Eve

A light dusting of snow covers the world outside the windows. When the sun rises higher, it will evaporate.

The day is packed with people frantic, needing, wanting.

Then it is over.

“Closed.”

I drove home alone and let the dogs out.

The evening passes as Christmas Eves do. Slowly and rapidly at the same time.

Finally to bed.

The first stroke after midnight. It is Christmas.

I awoke to the soft “pop” coming from the woodstove in the other room.

‘Some air pocket or joint in the log released by heat and flame,’ I thought.

Darkness surrounded me. Three big logs filled the fire box, I recalled. There had not been much effort to get the stove alight and alive before it was dampered down and I slunk to the bed and the inviting layers of softness and warmth. Slipping in amongst the warmth of cotton and wool, I will soon be warm and safe in that cloth cocoon.

“tick tick tick…” was the faintest whisper from the direction of the living metal edifice not ten paces from the foot of my bed.

At first, the sound seemed organic. Alive.

‘A mouse?’ I wondered in my near dream state. For I was somewhere in between consciousness and that other place, unsure which I wanted more.

“It is Christmas.”

Just barely. I should rouse myself for an hour or two and celebrate this occasion with a story or a poem from one of the books on the nightstand or on the floor before it. All were within reach in the dark.

“Tick Tick Tick…”

‘There’s never a mouse in the house,’ I think in the warmth, softness and darkness.

“TICK tick TICK…”

It is the kettle of water set atop the stove. Placed there so the fire below will turn the water to steam and add moisture to the air, which the glowing heat dries.

“TICK TICK TICK… ssssssssssssssss.”

I know the water is coming alive and faint wisps of vapor are rising from its surface.

Orange lights dance through the sooty windows in the two iron doors, which swing open when unlocked. It is there that larger chunks of firewood need to be wrestled in. That entrance is a bigger opening than the griddle like lid on the stove’s top surface.

I had opened the dampers a bit when I passed by to let the dogs out in the cold black night. First one, then the other and then the third. Each signaled their desire to step out into the frozen dead forest to relieve themselves.

When I went for Merry, he was seated on the wooden porch painted gray. He was not staring at the door that his master would surely open so he could come back into the warmth and safety of the brick and wooden walls and the shingled and insulated roof. Rather, he was seated, staring intently into the forest that quickly turns black and foreboding once the light from the house has reached its limited radius and faded to shadow and then disappeared, surrendering to the world of wilderness night beyond.

“What do you see, buddy?” I asked. His spell is broken. He turns toward me, rises and trots quickly inside.

---

Christmas Night

The faces of the past come and go. They fade in and out of focus. Some pause briefly, awaiting identification.

“What was her name?”

Others linger, and their countenances change, charting the years we spent in occasional or frequent company.

It is a silent procession. Are they in my mind’s eye? Or am I dreaming? Or are they here in the silent dark, appearing from somewhere beyond—where the light doesn’t reach?

There are some I wish would stay a bit and take a firmer form. But most pass in and then away quickly, much as they did long ago.

Then there are faces of the future. They are babies now and their faces indistinct. How they’ll appear as young men I will never know—at least from this plane.

I close my eyes. Or are they already closed? A voice calls from a distance.

“Come… come… come…”

But the bed is warm and soft. And it is winter outside. Who could be out in the wilderness alone on a night like this?

“Is it you? Returned like Alcestis?” I hunker down deeper under the layers of cotton and wool.

“Come…” the voice summons, gently imploring from somewhere beyond the black windows on my bedroom wall.

“I’m not ready yet,” I say. Or did I think those words? Or was I speaking in a dream?

“Come…”

“Why did you go and leave me to live a life alone?”

“Come…”

I would wake, so this would end.

“Am I awake?” I think or say or dream.

“Come and we can be as we were.”

“Out in the freezing black forest?”

“Come…”

I try to summon other faces like those that had been inside a short while ago.

None come.

“How long will this night last?” I worry. “When is the dawn?”

Some wood creaks in the next room. The sound is beyond the red-orange glow of the wood fire coming from behind the glass doors of the old iron stove.

“Come… I come…”

“Don’t. I am not as I was. I would rather you remember the flawless skin upon the face you knew when we were both new to one another.”

“I am. Come… Rise and walk with me. We shall go into the forest the many miles.”

“It is cold, and there’s not a star in the sky. I am warm here. The firelight is distant and so dim. Perhaps my features are not so changed.”

“Come down and out to me.”

“The stairs are steep and precarious in the dark.”

“Come…”

“And I’m not ready. Return some other year. Next Christmas perhaps. I will have a coat and books and an electric light ready to show the way.”

Then the fire abruptly died down, and the dim soft orange light it provided disappeared.

There was a moan as if from far, far away. Floorboards creaked, as did the walls throughout the upstairs.

Winds picked up outside, and the house shook.

I burrowed further under the covers and dragged pillows down from above and built a barrier all around.

No more faces appeared outside the bed nor inside my head. Sleep came, and if I dreamed, they did not stay with me.

When I awoke again, the first faint light of dawn was on the horizon.

I arose. Or dreamed I arose. I crossed the house. Past the dead woodstove. Fireless. Lightless. But still with an aura of warmth that I pass through toward the door.

There is a dusting of snow again. Like powdered sugar, it covers all the forest floor, the drive, the walkways, the gardens and stone walls.

My eyes focus just beyond the porch steps.

“Footprints?”

The track comes from the forest below and across the drive. Shoeless, bare feet made these prints. Small feet came within a dozen steps of the door. Step after step, the feet crossed toward the house til they stopped that dozen paces away. There they stood. Two bared feet next to one another, leaving their mark.

I opened the door and stepped outside to verify what I was seeing through the window on the door.

A woman had stood before my door in the dark. There had been no snow before the night fell.

Then she stepped again, turning left and walking up the mountain. One foot after the other until her trail disappeared in the dark forest where the dawn’s light had not yet reached.

I turned, or dreamed I turned, and went back inside and crossed the house. I passed the iron stove now alight and warming the room and then I was back in bed. Warm, buried beneath layers of cotton and wool.

Was I dreaming? Or was I home again? My mother was whistling “The Yellow Rose of Texas” downstairs in the kitchen. The scent of bacon and toasting bread wafted up the steps and into the bedroom of my childhood. All the world young and safe and alive.

I recalled the voice.

“Come…”

If I am called again, I will rise and go shoeless out into the dark for someone I know is there. I will take her hand and walk up into the wilderness. Up where the light ends and the dark forest begins. I know beyond the mountaintop there is the other side.

And there it is Christmas morn. The tree is lit with many colors. Around the tree, Mom, Dad, my brothers are seated on the living room carpet.

Then I will close my eyes and dream, and when I open them, it is you. Flawless, smooth skin. And we are seated on the hooked oval rug. Packages wrapped and pushed beneath the lowest evergreen branches. I had cut the tree down myself and dragged it in. My gifts awkwardly wrapped by clumsy hands. Yours precise with straight edges and defined corners. The gifts are nothing fancy but represent what we could afford and still buy—food, oil for the furnace and gas to get to work. Your small bare feet poke out from the hem of your robe. I hand you a gift, and you pass me mine. I carefully lift the colored paper where the tape holds it shut. I will save the wrapping. Fold it carefully so it can be used again next year when maybe there will be a little more money and freedom.

Back to sleep in the dark and silence of Christmas’s beginning just after midnight.

Dreams and faces.

Then I know dawn will come soon. Outside there are footprints in the dusting of snow. If I wait until the sun rises into the sky, the snow will disappear, and there will be no trail to follow up the mountain and into the pathless black forest.

“Come…”

I will.

I will pull the covers away and climb out of bed. I will cross before the warm orange glow dancing through the sooty glass on the doors and spreading onto the floor in front of the woodstove. Through the aura of warmth and into the darkness beyond. Colder each step further from the fire. Until I reach the door and pull it open. It is a cold, freezing, now cloudless night. This time there is just enough starlight to see the footprints of bare feet which crossed toward my home. And there stopped a dozen paces away. It was there she stood and spoke.

“Come…”

Then she turned and headed up the slope into the wilderness.

I was too slow, too apprehensive before.

Not this time.

I look up the mountainside and see her slight form shrouded in a white flowing gown. A gown like the angel wore perched high atop the tree. Christmas trees were so big and tall then.

If I hurry, I will catch up somewhere in the black forest beyond where the footsteps can be made out in the faint starlight.

But I must hurry, lest the dawn’s sunrise erases the trail and leaves me lost in the woods.

---

Christmas 2024

Saturday—The Winter Solstice

It was 64 degrees inside and 32 out when I awoke after 6. The actual solstice—the point where the tilt of the earth shifts making the sun appear to stop moving along the southern horizon and change course back to the north—occurred sometime after 4 a.m.

This “shortest day” will still be 24 hours long, but the time between sunrise and sunset will only be 9 hours and 21 minutes long. 7:28 a.m. to 4:49 p.m.

There was a striking sunrise to herald the seasonal change.

Winter did arrive as if on cue. Sunday was 19. Monday 16.

But the sunrises have begun creeping north. Each day has a little more light time.

In three months, around the spring equinox, the sunrise will have moved into the gap in the forest in front of my home. I will have a couple weeks of unimpeded views of the sunrise (barring cloudy weather.)

I spent the weekend going through books. Big surprise. Much of the vintage collection brought here by my friend, who has a bookstore in central New York, was carted up for my review. I found a stool and sat myself before them way up around Dock 14 in the Books by the Foot region. The ten or so carts went past me pretty quickly. So many of the antiquarian books could be deemed worthless to readers or collectors with a glance.

But I did pull off about a half cart that I felt were attractive enough or authored by desirable authors (Bronte, Austen, Poe…) that they could be sent to the stores.

The small cart in the forefront holds the books that made the cut. The jumble of carts behind it are the “rest.”

The “rest” would be rolled across the building to the west side of the warehouse where they’ll be shelved in rooms designated for 80 to 200-year-old “worthless” books.

I was also tasked with 10 big plastic tubs of LPs culled from our internet stock. We are extremely picky about condition for records offered for mail order. That’s the good news. The bad news is this is the stock that did NOT sell online. The tubs were very heavy. My back was spasming frequently, so I wanted to avoid constantly bending to the floor. Of course, hefting the heavy tubs to stack them created plenty enough back strain.

Were there about a thousand? More?

Although in fine condition—most still wearing their shrink-wrap—about half were classical music or religious offerings. There was also a smattering of foreign language, ethnic and popular music. All those are poor sellers for us. I love classical music, but for whatever reason, the retro bug doesn’t seem to have bitten the classical fans. Those LPs I set in lower price boxes. (I still didn’t think they would sell and imagined the grumblings by staff upon receiving them.)

The other half was a different story. Not much rock but a lot of jazz, R&B and Blues. Those went out to the stores at much higher prices and would bring the LP stockers joy.

I came across a poster for The Silmarillion in a box of Caedmon audio book cassettes.

A couple of cassettes were missing. When the book was released, I of course went out and bought it. But I found it confusing. Perhaps I was too young.

A stack of jacketed vintage baseball team histories appeared.

The Boston Braves. The Brooklyn Dodgers.

By Sunday’s end, my current little corner of the warehouse was stacked with boxes for the stores, yellow plastic tubs for Annika and Madeline, carts for online data entry…

My nephew had arrived at 3 p.m. He texted, “I’m outside.”

“I told you 4. Go away. Go shopping, and come back at 4.”

Those hours working alone are precious to me. I can make a difference. A small difference.

At 4, I let him in. He brought back a collection of Silver Age Marvel Comics I let him grade and price. I had identical copies to these when I was a boy.

Many go for over $100. A few over $1000.

He brought some other finds he made. “Stuff.” I paid him well. It’s Christmas.

And he was excited about presents he found for me. A Grateful Dead stocking and action figure? And a big old signed etching of Niagara Falls. His family brought him to grandma and grandpa’s house in Buffalo. My childhood home.

Then I took him and his son out for pizza. Old family stories were exchanged. He’s only nine years younger than I.

That night, I accidentally came across the Kennedy Center Honors being rebroadcast on TV. The Grateful Dead received the honor this year.

---

Monday was a busy day. The day before Christmas Eve. Vans were dispatched to the three stores.

A feast was brought in for the 65 or so people working at the warehouse.

I felt awkward standing before the audience.

I hope the “boss” hovering doesn’t ruin their appetites.

---

Christmas Eve

That morning, I stumbled across a story in the Frederick newspaper online. I don’t look at the site often. A man had been killed in a crash early Saturday morning. He had veered off the road and smashed into a tree. He died alone at the scene. The story said it happened only a mile from my house on the road I travel almost every day. (Often every day.) I’d noticed the big scar on the tree, and now I knew the reason.

The accident was around the time of the solstice. I wondered at the poor soul alone and in the cold and dark. Breathing his last on the country road. Is he at peace or will he wander the woods along that stretch?

The story said he worked in the business next to our warehouse. Perhaps I’d seen him getting in or out of his car in the parking lot I pass to get to ours.

I’ll pass that totem coming and going every day for… however long it is. A cautionary tale I’ll be told every morning and evening as I pass by.

At work, only about half the staff was present. It was busy but not frantic. The last special orders were delivered to the stores.

The warehouse was to close early. 4:30. The stores would shut down at 4.

I was the last to leave the warehouse. I lingered working. I wasn’t invited anywhere for Christmas Eve, so I just went home and heated some of the turkey I’d roasted and carved. I chopped up a head of romaine. I sliced some of the caraway-laden rye bread to toast. A bed of lettuce was set on a large plate. Heated turkey and cornbread stuffing was set atop that. A couple dollops of sour cream on one side. A couple dollops of Hellman’s Mayonnaise shaken off a spoon on the other side. I found a DVD of Reginald Owen’s A Christmas Carol in a drawer and indulged myself.

It was a delightful if moody evening. Comfort food. Fizzy water. An ancient motion picture which raised my spirits while moving me to tears.

That night, I had troubled dreams. Taking Christmas Ghost Stories to bed with me likely didn’t help.

And then it was after midnight.

Christmas.

More dreams. And memories. Happy and sad emotions. A long night waking and sleeping.

But the firelight danced all night long.

Christmas morning, I went into work with the dogs.

A solitary pleasure to have the warehouse to myself. Alone with millions of books.

Selfish?

Maybe.

I worked til late afternoon.

Then I drove to Pennsylvania to my younger son’s in-laws’ home. There would be no Christmas in the old house due to illness that the new babies couldn’t be exposed to.

It was the first time in 34 years there would be no family celebration there.

When I pulled into the driveway, there were three very small children riding shiny new tiny bicycles. Christmas presents. They are my son’s nieces and nephews.

Inside, the big old house was warm. Lots of people and lots of food. I felt welcome. The patriarch had been my dentist since the early 1980s.

My grandchild was there, cradled in his mother’s arms and then my son’s.

Then it was time to leave. Back to Maryland and the sprawling book warehouse.

I’ll visit my other son on Sunday in Virginia. There’s a two-week-old baby there and another 15 months old now.

I picked up the dogs and headed home.

---

It is Friday morning.

When I got home last night, there was enough daylight to go in the woods and cut up some deadfalls.

Then night came, and I loaded what I could see from the distant houselights into the truck I’d backed into the woods.

It is not work or labor. It is a joy to be part of the earth.