Excerpts from “What Christmas Is as We Grow Older”
By Charles Dickens
Time was, with most of us, when Christmas Day encircling all our limited World like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound together all our home enjoyments, affections, and hopes; grouped everything and every one around the Christmas fire; and made the little picture shining in our bright young eyes, complete.
It’s been unseasonably warm here in NYC. I’m not complaining – I spent a couple hours wandering in Manhattan on Saturday afternoon and it was lovely – though I am of course worried about the environment. But in a less cosmic way, the warm weather is throwing off my sense of time passing. The last six months have sped by for me and I’ve been making an effort over the last few weeks to stop and enjoy each day of the holiday season.
For me that has meant decorating my apartment, lighting candles, singing Christmas carols with two sets of choir friends this past Saturday, watching Muppets Christmas Carol (and some sappy Christmas romcoms that shall remain nameless), buying cards and making and buying presents. If I can find time – more likely to happen after Christmas than before – I want to visit the origami tree at the Natural History museum and the angel tree at the Met. I think I’m going to swing by Rockefeller Center on my way home from an event this week, just because.
Adapted and updated with info for 2015
I have a lot of love for Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. If you’ve managed to escape me talking too much about my five-year run as a child star in a local production back home—well, feel free to ask me about it. I might even sing for you. But for now I’ll just say, for those five years the time between Halloween and Christmas was Christmas Carol season for me, and in the years since I’ve had to feed my love for the story other ways. Watching A Muppets’ Christmas Carol is one of my favorites (even if it leaves out my beloved Fan, Scrooge’s little sister), but a few years back I experienced a new favorite: the marathon reading of A Christmas Carol at Housing Works’s bookstore café.
I put up my Christmas tree and lights before I left for Thanksgiving. I also straightened up my apartment and made my bed, so when I got back on Sunday, it felt like my apartment was welcoming me home. Cheesy, but exactly the feeling I was going for when I hung ornaments on the fake tree I’ve toted through two dorms and three apartments. And looking at my decorations also gives me a bit of the feeling I had when I stumbled on the holiday windows at Lord & Taylor a couple weeks ago.
My friends and I talk a lot about dating. (This may seem like a non sequitur, but bear with me.) Of course we do – we’re twenty-somethings and some of us live in New York, a city acknowledged by most as an impossible place to date. But recently a friend and I were talking about what makes a conversation flow, once you’ve gotten past normal dating awkwardness. I always bring up passion for your topic as a key factor – if you’re excited about it and can talk about it intelligently, I’ll probably be interested in what you’re saying. This time, though, we talked about liking people who have a sense of wonder – that feeling you get when you see a really gorgeous sunset over the river, or hear a piece of music that makes your heart hurt a little in the best way.
First posted December 24, 2013.
Excerpts from “What Christmas Is as We Grow Older”
By Charles Dickens
Time was, with most of us, when Christmas Day encircling all our limited World like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound together all our home enjoyments, affections, and hopes; grouped everything and every one around the Christmas fire; and made the little picture shining in our bright young eyes, complete.
One of my best friends was in town this weekend, and because she’s an art history person we had to make one of our annual visits to the Met. Her boyfriend had never been, so we gave him a quick highlights tour — and during it we came across a holiday exhibit that I liked almost as much as I love the origami tree at the Museum of Natural History. It’s called the Angel Tree.
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