Just a little Christmas ritual

All households that adhere to Christmas have their own rituals and rites for both the day and, especially, Christmas Eve. I like Christmas Eve because it remains a time of hope and aspiration. The day is all-to-often a kind of anticlimax that can make all the anticipation seem a trifle hollow. But on the Eve, all things are possible. The day to come might unfold as that archetypical Christmas that never seemed to manifest, yet each year we've gone on hoping that it will. That this year will be the one.

Some families make Christmas Eve a sacred event and go off to attend church services. Some years I do exactly that. While not being an organized religion person, I do like the ritual and I love the music.

For other families the Eve is a time of gathering friends and families together. That was always the case with my ex-wife's Christmas Eve, because that was indeed the family time and gift-giving time because she was of Swedish heritage and that's the way they do things. I don't know if I liked that so much because it didn't seem to leave much for the day other than turkey sandwiches and sitting around staring at one another.

I have a special little item on my Christmas Eve agenda, and that is a viewing of A Christmas Carol. Not just any old Christmas Carol, but the one with the inimitable Alastair Sim as Scrooge. Other versions of the Dickens tale interest me not at all. The moody and grim, black and white version with Sim, which was released in 1950 (and ran in theatres of the day as Scrooge, by which name it is still known in the UK) is to me the epitome of the Christmas story in its true meaning.

To work its magic a Christmas Carol must be viewed on Christmas Eve, or the miracles mean less. As I say, the Sim version is remarkable in showing the transformation of a man from the mean and cruel Scrooge, venal and heartless, to the magnificently transformed entity he becomes at the end. Of course, perverse bastard that I am, I am especially charmed by the mean Scrooge, for never did a man have a nastier face that pre-transformed Scrooge as played by Sim. Somehow his big puppy-dog eyes at the end of the tale are almost less enchanting.

I have viewed A Christmas Carol on the Eve every year since I was about 12. For years I've had it on video. I know the dialogue virtually by heart and can irritate family members by reciting the lines before they are uttered. Call it a weakness.

So, that is Christmas Eve for me. As for the day, it calls for my recording of Dylan Thomas himself reciting A Child's Christmas in Wales. Never was a tale so enchanting and nostalgically evocative, especially considering the drunken reprobate who pulled the story together. Anyway, that's it for me. Give me those two and I am content.

Blessings to you all, and thank you for the lovely sentiments you expressed on my 'Merry Christmas' blog. They mean a lot.