~:: Take it again, from the top – ::~

Ah, the time wings by, doesn’t it?  How can you “keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor’s household should,” and still have time to write about the experience?

Here is the coolest possible thing in parenthood: when your grown up, single, working daughter has a mess of errands to run on a Saturday before Christmas and knows her mother is not about to sally out into that mess of a commercial world (not with the mound of surprises yet to be prepared here at home), she turns to her pretty much grown up little student brother: “You wanna come with me?”

And he says “YES!!”

And they spend the entire afternoon together, and have a great time doing it.

After all the years of family building—this is a deep reward and a marvelous satisfaction.

Especially when they bring home the dinner.

I don’t know when he started to do it.  Come to think of it, I don’t even know when he first discovered the book.  I’ll ask, but he won’t remember and he’ll get snippy about that.  But my dad used to read us the entire Christmas Carol (Chas. Dickens) out loud every Christmas. It took a week’s worth of evenings, he in his chair by the Christmas tree and the rest of us lolling about – usually on the floor (all except mom, who was almost never a floor person).

The very book, now a little brittle around the edges, and without its clear cover –

Reading aloud was a thing he’d done while we were growing up – Robinson Caruso, The Promised Land series, Fairy Tales.  I remember him doing it in LA, when I was about nine.  I don’t think I remember it later than that.  But he read the Dickens to us every year.  Every year that I remember.

And he was good.  (He still is. Feeling a little eulogized, Dad?)

He had a great voice for reading, and a marvelous connection with the Dickensian phrase; together, my father and Mr. Dickens could turn an adjective as though it had a nap to it, and a shape you could feel in your hand.  Juicy as a James Christianson bauble.

It was inevitable that he’d end up angry at some point.  He didn’t understand that we were listening to every word, even when we seemed to be messing around.  I know how he felt; I’ve read it every year to my own kids.  And what I have learned is that, messing around or not, they nearly have the entire story memorized and will (annoyingly) say full sentences of it right along with me as I read them.

There are literary snobs who turn their noses up at this story.  If they call it “popular fiction” or brand it “commercial,” they are, of course, right.  Dickens wrote for money and much of his stuff was published in magazines as serials.  But I will tell you that, after all my classical reading, I have never found words more evocative, more satisfying to the mouth that forms them, or more delicious to the ears that will hear than you will find in this piece of writing.

Man with three dogs.

The words.  The words.  The words.  They shimmer.  They are luscious.  But most of all, they speak.  And when my father spoke them, he used his voice like an instrument, and when I read it aloud myself, I echo him, because his voice and the words are now inseparable in my mind.  And I am also a dang good reader.

The new room, which I call the LL (long and light).  Now full of ornament boxes.

At some point, after I was long gone and bringing up children of my own, my dad sat down with a tape recorder and recorded his reading on cassettes.  Not happy with the first effort, he did the whole thing again.  Years later, I made him sit down in the studio, during a visit up here, and do it again.  Nothing is quite the same recorded as it is live, but he came very close.  Very close to what I remembered.  And now my children have the mp3.  And they listen to it.

Last week, Murphy started us off for the season by insisting that we start the reading.  And as I knitted madly away at small peppermint horses, he did the work, his interpretation of the text sounding like his mother sounding like her father.

We are a family that loves traditions, making them into something like small boxes of scented wood to hold our mutual memories.  We become our own micro-culture, with our festivals and rituals and ways.  Like other families I know.

Traditions tie us together.  And Murphy’s children, long after I am a memory, may very well tap into the same rich vein as the rest of us, listening to their father read to them, and then reading the story themselves, sounding like their father, who sounds like me, sounding like mine.