One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.Narrator
It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers.Narrator
Christmases roll on and . . . every Christmas Day our Uncles and our Cousins, all, God bless them, were wonderfully well, smacked their lips over the leek soup, chuckled deep and long over White Queen potatoes and pale with mystery, laughed softly and alone staring into the Good Fire.Narrator
All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street.Narrator
I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea.Narrator
And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn't the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets.Narrator
Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang 'Cherry Ripe,' and another uncle sang 'Drake's Drum.'Narrator
There were paper roses on the picket fence. God knows when they had come from; they were up there simmering in the moonlight when we began to sing.Narrator
Bedroom and sea, whispering to the children's room, like a big-bosomed mother, shushing the way the rain shushes, the sleepy, streaming windows tell everything of mystery to the children.Narrator
I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night.Narrator