“Child’s Christmas”

“By now it was the height of the holiday season: carolers stood on street corners and sometimes even went door-to-door, poultry hung in various shapes and weights from hooks atop the butchers’ counters, and street lights, buildings, and houses glittered in silvery light-strands, garlands of golden tinsel, and outlines of parti-colored bulbs. At night trees draped in electric plumage shone like luminous filigree, as if a new and celestial arboreal species had descended to earth. Facades of homes disappeared, as if the substantial structures behind them had vanished, being replaced by rectilinear borders of carmine, ultramarine, genet yellow, and pearl white. Golden pentacles, with the spans of large birds, gleamed from atop lamp posts. The lights of a Christmas tree or smaller ornament symbolic of the holiday shone from nearly every window in their neighborhood. Front doors were covered ground to lintel with jolly posterboard Santa heads. If snow had fallen that year, crude reindeer with stick antlers and tails stood sentry next to bigger snowmen. People grew happier. In the stores, festive songs told of drummer boys and Santa Claus’s coming to town and more fervent hymns like “Adeste Fideles” and “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” reminded him that December 25th was a holy as well as a fun day. His friends talked endlessly about what gifts they hoped to receive from Santa. It seemed to him that the flurries falling from the heavens contained some magic powdered dust that, inhaled by everyone, made their souls more joyful and loving.”