Twas the Week Before Christmas

For the first time in my grown-up life, Christmas does not feel like an enemy I have had to have fisticuffs with throughout December but is instead a much-anticipated visitor who has arrived in the night bearing gifts of promise and clementines to be eaten in front of wonderful television like The Making of A Lady…
There was something of the blissful this morning, creeping down the stairs before Finley woke up, to switch on the fairy lights and fill the little stocking on his advent calendar with chocolate and a coin. I made coffee and ate crumbled Stilton on warm oatcakes and as it was still so very early and so very, very dark, I curled up under a green patchwork quilt and read by the light of a candle, the rain pattering on the windows my only music and my feet cosily ensconced in leopard skin bed-socks.
I read out loud to myself: a whispered narrative of Victorian Christmas at six o’clock in the morning. For there is a special place in my heart for the Christmas books of yesteryear.  For all of those  books found on the Gutenberg Christmas book-shelf. Most are chocolate box sweet: sickly and moreish, tinged with melancholia and joy and I simply cannot get enough of them!  Some of them I barely understand, and some preach in a fashion I can barely tolerate, but to each of my stolen Christmas mornings, they bring a spoonful of nostalgic magic for the kind of Christmas’s that I, as a child of the 1970’s could never have really known…
Now there is just a week until my favorite day of the year: Christmas Eve, and  I have nothing else to do but to read A Christmas Accident and to bake chocolate and marzipan cookies.  All my presents are wrapped, all my cards written…
It feels odd. Worrying. As if there is something ENORMOUS I have forgotten. One shouldn’t be someone else at Christmas. It is rather disconcerting.
Nothing left to do but dream.

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6 Comments

  1. I am feeling exactly the same. Which is just as well as I seem to have come down with a bug this week! Like most people we are having a parred down Christmas due to financial constraints. But if spending less brings more contentment and makes Christmas a relaxing time rather than a stressful one then this is a very good lesson learnt for future Christmases!

    Reply

  2. I love, love , love your blog…thank you for all you do…I tried to download several of the Gutenberg Christmas books to my Kindle fire…they will not open up. Any suggestions? Thank you for allowing me to live an English life vicariously through you….Merry Christmas…

    Reply

    1. Hi Sheri, thank you for your lovely comment.If you go to openlibrary.org, search for the book you have chosen at Gutenberg and link your Kindle to your Open Library account, Amazon will deliver the document straight to your Kindle and it should open easily like that.
      Hope this works!

      Have a wonderful Christmas.

      Alison.x
      P.S: the majority of Gutenberg books are available in the Kindle store for free too, so seach there first.

      Reply

  3. I am feeling exactly the same. Which is just as well as I seem to have come down with a bug this week! Like most people we are having a parred down Christmas due to financial constraints. But if spending less brings more contentment and makes Christmas a relaxing time rather than a stressful one then this is a very good lesson learnt for future Christmases!

    Reply

  4. I love, love , love your blog…thank you for all you do…I tried to download several of the Gutenberg Christmas books to my Kindle fire…they will not open up. Any suggestions? Thank you for allowing me to live an English life vicariously through you….Merry Christmas…

    Reply

  5. Thanks for the Gutenberg Christmas Bookself suggestions.I put a couple on my Kindle. I feel kinda rough today so I might crawl under a blanket and take a nap with “A Christmas Accident.”Thanks love…Sally

    Reply

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