Icy Christmas

 

A few years ago, before I started this blog, I went home for Christmas (very much like I am preparing to do right now as a matter of fact) and when I got there, the weather was off the scale. The whole island was covered in ice – even the tide line, salty as it is, was frozen into sharp little shards of ice that crackled and cracked as the waves churned them about. 

As E.B. White, whose 1950s New Yorker Christmas writings I like to read at this time of year, put it: 'Everyone has one Christmas he remembers above all others, one blindingly beautiful occasion.' And I think this one is mine, in terms of on-the-surface beauty at least. 

While I'm half glad that it is not meant to freeze this year, as it makes driving the length of the country a bit of a roulette, the fact that the island won't look like this this Christmas (or perhaps ever again!) is a little sad. So I thought I would post these to remind myself, as E.B White also writes in a different Christmas essay: 'Rememberance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen' which is a thought that I quite like.