Why I like the Christmas season

I am a big fan of snow, perhaps because I have never had to drive in it while it's coming down and because I have never had to shovel a lot of it single-handed. I associate shovelling with almost ridiculously Rockwellesque scenes of my father, my brother, and me cavorting in the yard, combining walk-clearing with fort-building, or of my father calling my three-or-four-year-old self Miss Bianca as we cleared the snow to rescue someone. (He was, as always, Bernard the janitor.)

I like wrapping presents. I suppose it satisfies the part of me that craves order to transform a wide variety of objects into neat, bright packages. Wrapping paper, ribbons, tape and tissue paper, I like it all. I even enjoy the challenge of odd-shaped gifts, like the triangular frisbee-like throwing toy I gave M one Christmas.

I like a lot of sacred Christmas music. Even the hardy perennials like "Joy to the World," if all the verses are performed, but especially the just-off-the-path ones like "In the Bleak Midwinter" (historical inaccuracy and all), and more obscure ones like "Twas in the Moon of Wintertime (The Huron Carol)." I like the old English carols like "The Boar's Head" and "Gloustershire Wassail," and Benjamin Britten's "Ceremony of Carols." I can even get behind a performance of Part I plus Hallelujah Chorus of Handel's Messiah (though if I were a professional like mommybird, pistorius, or the drood-cscott family, I'm sure that last one would change in self-defense.)

I like pine boughs.

I like candles.

I like pies and cookies and fudge and sticky buns and coffee cakes.

I like the ancient, much-travelled, much-mended creche that my father grew up with and that my brother and I now arrange on the top of the china cabinet in my parents' dining room, and the wooden angels from Thailand that my dad puts on the mantel, and the mock birds' nests my mother sets in the tree, and the host of corn-silk angels I hang around the peak of the tree, and the nostalgia-heavy conversation we have while unpacking the decorations.

I like Christmas Eve service at my grandmother's church, including trying not to giggle at the painfully slow tempo at which the organist takes the carols.

I like singing and playing Christmas carols in the Schultzes family room after Christmas dinner. Don S. plays cello, Uncle P and Hope trade off at the piano, my brother plays violin, and I play flute. (A melody line of a hymn being about the scope of my abilities.) My father and I sing John McCutcheon's "Christmas in the Trenches" and often "Calling all the Children Home" too.

And I really like giving people presents, seeing them opened, and telling the recipient about how I chose it, or how I made it, or where I got it, and by extension how much and how fondly I think of them.