We tend to eat by candlelight during December. Usually I buy one of those with the days marked off, to burn down each evening. It never really works all that well. Either the candle burns too quickly or too slowly. This year I didn't get a candle because I haven't been shopping as such. But I have a little glass Christmas Tree behind which I can place a tealight and I am using that on our table this year.
It's strange how many useless traditions we observe regarding Christmas, as if it is more than one day, as if it's all about food, as if it is all about (eherm) the economy! This is how we have been conditioned to think. There are so many gifts we can give that are worth so much more. Clothes we don't need to charities, food to the foodbanks, some time, a smile, a laugh, a poem. This year nearly all my gifts were masks to protect my friends and loved ones. The money will be helping a charity. And it's the nearest thing to a hug I can give them. They all know I don't like hugs anyway.
I Light a Candle
I light a candle.
There’s no need
except a desire for flickering
warmth and dancing fire.
I light a candle;
watch the primal
space that is infra-red
with scientific detachment.
My candle is not tallow
spermaceti or beeswax
but a hydrocarbon
by-product of ocean-bed long dead;
not very romantic,
not very devotional.
I will mark off
feast days in candle hours
invest festive emotion
into each illumination;
invoke times past
and eke the darks days out
with thoughts of
loved ones gone
and loved ones far
and near. Year on year
I light a candle.
There’s no need
except the heart’s deep yearning
for some ancestral hearth.
