During the Christmas season there are several things I like to read and reread. First, I enjoy all the personal notes and little newsletters I get with Christmas cards. I like to keep up with folks and enjoy reading their stuff. It’s even fun to hear their bragging about kids and grandkids. Some like to inform me that their offspring have done marvelous things like winning the Nobel Prize for discovering the cure for cancer and such. Only a few tell the real truth about such matters as a kid being release from prison or being on probation for narcotic possession, etc. Anyway, I always enjoy hearing from friends.

The other reading I enjoy at Christmas is rereading Charles Dickens, ‘” A Christmas Carol.” I never tire of that one. I also enjoy rereading Truman Capote’s, “A Christmas Memory.” These are great stories. Of course, even at my age I find an excuse to read Clement Moore’s, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” or “The Night Before Christmas.”

One of the best descriptions of Christmas is from the “Pickwick Papers,” Chapter 28 by Charles Dickens. Those two paragraphs are as follows, and are sure worth reading slowly to savor the language of Dickens and the feeling of Christmas.

“And numerous indeed are the hearts to which Christmas
brings a brief season of happiness and enjoyment. How many
families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far
and wide, in the restless struggles of life, are then reunited, and
meet once again in that happy state of companionship and mutual
goodwill, which is a source of such pure and unalloyed delight;
and one so incompatible with the cares and sorrows of the world,
How many old recollections, and how many dormant sympathies, does Christmas time awaken!”

“We write these words now, many miles distant from the spot
at which, year after year, we met on that day, a merry and joyous
circle. Many of the hearts that throbbed so gaily then, have
ceased to beat; many of the looks that shone so brightly then,
have ceased to glow; the hands we grasped, have grown cold; the
eyes we sought, have hid their lustre in the grave; and yet the old
house, the room, the merry voices and smiling faces, the jest,
the laugh, the most minute and trivial circumstances connected
with those happy meetings, crowd upon our mind at each
recurrence of the season, as if the last assemblage had been but
yesterday! Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the
delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the
pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the
traveler, thousands of miles away, back to his own fireside and
his quiet home!”

The only other writings better than these are found in the Bible in the second chapters of Matthew and Luke. So, Merry Christmas from the porch. The deer who are enjoying a Christmas feast, provided by my yard, also wish you a Happy New Year.