I’m a pretty hopeless Christmas romantic I admit it.  But not the kind that wears a Christmas sweater with holly, cardinals and snowflakes on it, pulls out the Christmas decorations in October, buys Christmas presents in July, or loves to go in The Christmas Store all year long.  Nothing wrong with that, but that isn’t what I mean.

I love feeling the childlike wonder of snow, smells, and stories.  Here are some of the things that evoke memories of my childhood in a time that was simpler, and safer.  

I offer apologies in advance to those of you who do not celebrate Christmas.  I’m afraid I’m a hopeless Christmas romantic and I’m about to indulge in some happily sentimental recollections and musings.

But first, let me say what I’m NOT sentimental about.  It is not about over the top Christmas displays or starting Christmas on Nov.1.  It most certainly is not anything to do with piles of gifts.  It is not about spending too much.  It is not about elevator type Christmas music.  It’s not about children’s shows and movies created expressly to have kiddos clamoring to buy all kinds of branded stuff.  It’s really not much at all about the 'trappings' of Christmas.  Our family has opted out of most of those.    

No, what I LOVE is the feeling and wonder Christmas evokes.  I feel lucky that I have a Mom who wove a long lasting holiday tapestry of good smells, traditions, images, stories and wonder in my memory.  It has given me so much pleasure over the years.  It isn’t about the religious aspects of it although music, stars, wise men, incense and the rest are inextricably intertwined in my memories.  It’s a feeling that’s a little tricky to explain.

It’s the rich spicy smell of Williamsburg bayberry candles Mom burned almost 24/7 from Thanksgiving through the new year from the time I was twelve until a few years ago when they stopped making them.  They had a unique fragrance I have never found in any other bayberry candle.  We were heartbroken when we learned they weren’t making them any more.  How would Christmas be Christmas without the faint traces of bayberry smell that clung to our hair and clothes and seemed to permeate the furniture and draperies?

It’s the vivid imagery like this contained in one of my favorite Christmas books, Lanterns Across the Snow by Susan Hill, about a little English girl in the early 1900s waiting impatiently for Christmas to come:

"It had been snowing all day.  It lay, softly piled over the earth and outlining the curve of each grey gravestone...the ledge outside her window was fat with snow.  The church roof, the church porch, the bushes, and the yew trees that stood, like statues in skirts, were soft with snow, and the sky was grey as a wolf’s coat, and still it went on snowing."

Fat with snow!  Can’t you just see that?  Whew, in my imagination I’m there, watching the feathery flakes drift to the ground.   I WISH I was there, oh to have a snowy holiday season, I LONG for it!

And then, no one has a way with evocative words about Christmas like Dylan Thomas.  A Child's Christmas in Wales is a story detailing the marvelment (yes, a word I made up, give me a break) of a young boy’growing up in Wales:

"One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six...”

Or, A Child’s Christmas In Wales on the subject of presents:

"There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be tug-o'-warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o'-shanters like patchwork tea cozies and bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shrinking tribes; from aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were mustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us. And pictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles' pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why."

How could you NOT get pulled in to that and imagine the blizzard of paper and presents of a Christmas celebrated with cousins, aunts, and uncles?