Christmas Eve is ten days away!  The buzz has as usual heightened upon every turn!  Throughout the Town there are charming front-door wreaths, glistening lights on trees, magnanimous exchanges of greetings by regular mail and email, non-stop sentimental carols on the radio and appetizing evidence of seasonal cooking and treats. This is the first winter we’ve spent in Canada – specifically, in the cold – for years and years. Certainly we occasionally hearken back to fond memories of the southern Atlantic coast or the green shores of the Gulf of Mexico but we have succeeded to rise above the pandemic interference and now seek to derive whatever benefit we can from this wintry clime.

As we approach this pinnacle of retail and Christian absorption so too flourishes the magic of the unimaginable, from virgin birth to Santa Claus. It is however a tolerable deceit given the intractable virtue of the divine and the impossible. Within this immediate vicinity of the circumference of the season it is preferable to ignore the vulgar necessity of truth and reality. This is no gross pragmatic choice but rather a devotion to palatable and ephemeral fraud. Besides such trite obstruction would not sustain a violation of dreams nor would I propose that it does. It is as unforeseeable as promoting the unparalleled truth of the deceased at a funeral.

The incomprehensible power that draws butterflies around the globe is indescribable beauty without the benefit of fiction. But life occasionally needs some butter or icing as unhealthy as it may be – the nonessential stuff that makes life worth living.

We’re already looking forward to the annual reel of Alastair Sim’s performance in A Christmas Carol.