A Christmas Story

"I'm ready for my close-up", our little table top Christmas tree seemed to say. With the Canon G11 Santa left for me, I too, felt ready, and set the scene by randomly placing votive candles among freshly cut evergreen branches (a la Axel Vervoordt) and snapped this photo, and the one below.

When I was little, my mother told me about what Christmas had been like for her as a child, the youngest of five born to farmstead parents in the Mississippi delta. Growing up during the Great Depression, Santa Claus would bring her a pair of new shoes... and an orange. I remember her telling me that she always really looked forward to getting that orange at Christmas.

I didn't understand when I was kid, it just seemed so weird to me, a child of the suburbs, used to seeing oranges piled high in the produce section of every grocery. Somehow, now, it seems to me a perfect memory... a Christmas story from another era, yet one that resonates deeply for me today.

I lost both my parents this year, and the holidays brought bittersweet reminders of Christmas past. We listened to Dad's favorite Christmas music (he loved Nat King Cole's versions), watched classic movies like "White Christmas" (she loved Danny Kaye) and "Christmas in Connecticut" (he really liked Barbara Stanwyck),  and we placed some oranges around the base of our little tree... for my Mom.

Tangled Up In Blue Christmas

... is what they should have titled the new Bob Dylan collection of holiday melodies. I consider myself a Dylan fan, so I happily snapped the above iPhone pic of his image on the wall of an alley during a recent trip to Brussels. Discovering his newest music offering on Amazon.com this morning while doing some last minute shopping, I thought 'oh, this might be good' and clicked on the the 'preview all songs' button. After few bars of the first couple of numbers, I was transported, as if by a Dickensian ghost, to a vision of sitting on a barstool in a dark and smoky crosstown joint on Christmas Eve, befriended by a few lonely kooks out of a Charles Bukowski novel, a malfunctioning jukebox rotating this CD all night while a gravely voiced bartender entertains us by alternately coughing up his versions of a duet and blowing Lucky Strike smoke rings. If you should give it a listen, please let me know... do you hear what I hear?

Here's a happy alternative... how about Diana Krall singing 'Jingle Bells' and other holiday standards while sharing champagne and foie gras at home with friends and family... and may Messrs. Dickens and Bukowski, merry gentlemen, rest in peace.

Good Weekend!

image: here