ShawneeDispatch.com

Ever notice how, each year, the Christmas Spirit just sort of comes over you all at once?

I find it strange. Oh, you know Christmas is coming, all right, but it’s just sort of out there somewhere, like winter or spring is coming or one of these days you need to get a haircut or have the car serviced. One minute it’s just another cool, late-fall day and then you cross some kind of threshold and, wow! All of a sudden, it’s Christmas.

You walk through a doorway into a room and it’s like somehow you’ve traversed a rift in time and space. On one side is ordinary life; on the other, Christmas.

Often as not, I find that I can usually hear Christmas music when this transformation occurs. I remember sitting around singing carols in a beatnik coffee house down in Westport almost 50 Christmases ago when I was home from college; a few years later I wandered into a USO on the other side of the world, and heard some yuletide standards on a phonograph.

It probably has something to do with the weather, as well. I’ve never had the experience of spending Christmas where it was warm, like at or below the Equator, but I know people who live in those places celebrate Christmas as ardently as we who live where the chilly winds doth blow. I just think it must be different. Part of the change I’m speaking of may have something to do with walking out of the cold, into a place where it’s cheery and warm.

Just this past weekend, we were out doing our part to bolster the sagging economy by keeping a portion of our money in circulation — in this instance we were doing the Christmas shopping, but the truth is we do some sort of shopping virtually every weekend of the year — when we wandered into the coffee bar at the bookstore where we often spend part of our Saturdays.

It was a warm and comfortable place faintly scented with spices and coffee, a welcome respite from the blustery cold outside. A young woman with a sweet, clear voice was singing some Christmas standards — not carols, but the Tin Pan Alley variety.

I am a true connoisseur of Christmas music. I love them all, from “Adeste Fidelis” to “The Zither Carol.” And so, while I browsed the shelves and then later sat there with a cappuccino, the spirit came upon me. I knew that it was finally Christmas.

The mood, of course, passed. You can’t sustain that feeling indefinitely. But it’s there now, and, like a fire that’s banked under a bed of ashes, all that it will take to make it spring forth again is another favorite song or some other talisman of the season.

If history is any judge, that will happen several times more in the next nine days. And, we’ll have several opportunities to share that with family, as our children and grandchildren come to visit.

It’s all about keeping Christmas, as Mr. Dickens would have put it. For that, we can have no better example than old Scrooge:

“It was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless Us, Every One!”

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