Xmas Eve

I've never cared much for writing Christmas as "Xmas", but you may have gathered that I've been loosely doing a sort of alphabetical theme this month. This is because by the end of November I had only posted seventy-four posts and I'm just obsessive enough to want to have written at least one hundred posts per year. Faced with twenty-six posts wanting, I thought: What the a-b-c...

Christmas Eve here in Hades has been a mixture of busy and quiet. Younger daughter, who has been ill this past week, made it clear that she wanted to go out, a sure sign she's getting better. (Naturally, I feel a sore throat coming on.) So out we went to see Arthur Christmas which was pretty charming, actually. Hard to go wrong with a film made by the Wallace and Gromit team, voiced by the likes of Jim Broadbent, Bill Nighy, Hugh Laurie and Imelda Staunton among many others.

When we emerged from the multiplex, the western horizon was an amber glow, and younger daughter impatient to get home: "C'mon! It's dark!" We grabbed a half-filled bus and hurried through the Rideau Centre which seemed to be full of women in hajib, all shops but the snack bars and the drug store shuttered up.

Christmas is tomorrow. Our gifts are wrapped; the tourtière is in the freezer. The best thing for now is a song in a John Rutter setting, the anti-Semitic lyrics of the original mercifully expunged, leaving a lilting, lovely choir piece. These young ladies are in the Oxford High School Caritas, in Oxford, Michigan.


May you dance, too.