Christmas Light

One of the great beliefs over the course of civilization is the descent of a god onto earth. Thinking about that incomprehensible transmigration in down-to-earth terms of light, the glories, the haloes, the portents which Tintoretto and Turner paint, the great mysteries of the sky on Christmas Day are often muted, muffled by the snow cumuli which hover proprietarily over the subdued snowscapes of the Dutch masters.

People skate soundlessly under darkened skies in Bosch, Brueghel, Avercamp in the 1500’s and 1600s, when such scenes were the most intense expressions of community imaginable. The snowfall from the heights, the acts of God, the processes of sublimation which now and then gift us such undisturbed interludes, create out of their transcendent phenomena the flat light which cradles my memories of childhood Christmases, filled with snowball fights, snow forts, tobogganing, and ice skating. Those revelations continued with bonfires, torchlit night skis, and cross-country glides through snowbound forests when we lived in the mountains in Colorado.

The sky descends on us at such moments, the heavens brought down to earth, and the life I imagine the ancient gods live in the palaces of the clouds is shared with us. The featureless dusk which falls during the day removes the Photoshopped colors, the illusions that normally entertain us, and we are left with the underlying essence of shapes, that chill hum of planets, the crystal skeleton of iced ponds and frozen trees which invigorates our spirits, and which we recollect every so often with wonder, remembering the warmth of the log fire, the affirming spices of hot cider, the coziness of Icelandic sweaters, the sleigh bells in the Hungarian friskas of Liszt’s rhapsodies.

The gift of such moments is that the ineffable sacraments, the unknowable scenery of the high skies is humanized, turned into a vocabulary we can absorb. There is a miracle to winter that is compressed into just one day each year which transfigures us, clarifies us. The way a Schenkerian diagram eliminates the decorations of music in favor of its deeper structures, the great backlog of mystery and imagination is reborn in us, if we let it, this one time each year. The world stops for us, finished rotating, and the universe is suspended so we can see it clearly, as vision always seems so much more acute when we can see our own breath.

There were a few magical years when I would wander from the living room where the unwrapped presents lay on the Khorasan tree rug, the Derakhti Goldani, under the blinking lights of the tree into the dining room, where the snow was mounded high outside the window sills, and the lawn was a featureless blur of white through the frosted glass: musical rests, fermata, discontinuities in space that endure, after all the outrage of life falls away.

My grandfather, Will O’Brien, was born and died on Christmas Day. My mother was born on Christmas Day.