Boxing Day

9:22 Tuesday

26 December 2017

— The sun perfectly balanced on the top of the rose trellis.

Good Morning All, 

The past couple of three years, my Thanksgiving repasts have consisted of either a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or—if I were in a festive mood when at the grocery store the day before—some turkey-flavored cream cheese on white toast. During those 4th November Thursdays, I felt betimes legitimately miserable and betimes sort of enjoying my self-pity. I’d think of childhood Thanksgivings, my mom bustling back and forth with the many bowls, the steamy aroma rising from them. I’d think of dad standing at his end of the table with his tie neatly clipped to his white shirt with one of his 1950s gold tie-bars. He’d be sharpening the long carving knife with the  bone-handled file and would invariably make reference to “the groaning board”. 

I’d think of Johs and Holly and so many other family members and friends  across the waters sharing the feast and communion of the day, and in my “inward eye" I’d sit down to dinner with them much as Wordsworth got to enjoy his daffodils many more times than once.  I’d feel happy for their feeling happy. (In between periods—of course—of still feeling moderately miserable!)

I mention this in part because I do well know that for anyone experiencing Christmas alone, that’s got to be like lonesome Thanksgiving squared. I mention it in part because today’s ode in the Day Book is not the cheeriest poem ever written, but at the same time one of the single most beautiful, most melodious, and—in a triumph of irony—one of the most soothing melancholic poems in the English Canon. 

It is Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. It’s thirty-two quatrains long. I’ve included only the first four, though if you have the time today or this week during a lull in the holiday season I cannot recommend highly enough you give it a read. It was partly inspired by Gray's thoughts following the death of the poet Richard West, but it is mostly about the humble and unheralded rustics who lived out their lives as farmers and farmers’ wives in that area. Thomas Hardy took his title Far from the Madding Crowd from it. It is an elegy, a tribute to the dead, but it reads almost like a lullaby.

That said, and against that backdrop, I am yet that lucky to celebrate Christmas in the bosom of family. I drove into Sorø to pick up Esther at 3:00. She, at the age of eighty, had supplied the turkey and stuffing, excellent gravy, cranberry sauce, creamed onions, potatoes, corn, a Christmas pudding with brandy hard sauce, mince pies, and--just in case we were still peckish after second helpings of every thing—a large Christmas fruit cake. From my modest wine cellar, we accompanied all that with a bottle of South African red from 2009.

We ate around 5:00. In between the turkey and the Christmas pudding, we lit the forty-two candles on the tree and sat around the tree exchanging gifts with curious hints on the tags, conversing the while in family cadences and rhythms that must go back millennia. Somehow, Holly had sensed I needed a couple of new crossword puzzle books, and Johs gave me a British krimi novel by an author new to me. We and the Christmas tree seemed together glowing in one warm accord.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron