Eternity
There they sat, those two happy ones, grown up,
and yet children—children in heart, while all around
them glowed bright summer—warm, glorious summer.
~hans christian andersen, “the snow queen”
By Candlemas, a full forty days will have passed since Christmas. Mary will have been churched,47 so to speak; the days will have grown longer; and there will be little need for candles except from a spiritual point of view. On Candlemas Day, you can sit in a clean-swept parlor and watch the snowdrops opening outside the window, but tonight there is work to be done. “Down with the rosemary, and so/Down with the bays and mistletoe”48 and all the other Christmas greens: down they must come if you have not already stripped your mantels and banisters.
Nowadays, most of us are sparing with the greens, contenting ourselves with a wreath on the door and one waifish sprig of mistletoe hanging from the lintel. Swags and roping cost money, but back in the good old days when England was a maze of hedgerows, they were mostly free. At Christmastime, English churchwardens went a little wild, not so much with the rosemary and the bay—Mediterranean natives that must be cultivated—but with mistletoe, holly, ivy, broom, and box. It was largely English monks who ventured to the continent in the eighth and ninth centuries to stop the Germanic tribesmen worshipping among the trees or, worse yet, worshipping the trees themselves, so it’s a little ironic that at Christmas the primeval forest should have reappeared inside the English church.
Most churches and homes had their decorations down by January 7, but it was permissible to leave them up until Candlemas. If you kept them up longer than that, you risked an infestation of undesirable spirits. For each leaf—some said needle or twig—of Christmas greenery lingering in the house after that date, there would be one goblin cavorting with the dust bunnies under the sofa or elsewhere in the house. But what to do with all those prickly things once they had been torn from their hooks and piled outside the door? The sheer volume of “brownery” was the perfect excuse for a bonfire. This “Burning of the Greens” survives as a pyre built of Christmas trees in many American towns, especially in New England. In nineteenth-century Scotland, where there was little to be had in the way of Christmas greens, people observed Candlemas with bonfires of the yellow-flowered gorse and broom they gathered on the moor.
Judging by the number of crunchy brown wreaths still drooping on doors on Valentine’s Day, it seems that people just don’t worry about goblins anymore. I’d like to believe that this is because, on Candlemas, we’re too busy enjoying one last hurrah to think about undecorating, but for most of us, this is not the case. In Mexico, El Día de la Candelaria is a day of fireworks and children’s parties, and a few European countries hold candlelit processions, but these are the exceptions. Here in the twenty-first century, our lack of imagination has succeeded in banishing the ghosts, goblins, witches, and elves better than any bonfire could. By February 2, we have long since forgotten about Christmas and returned to the workaday world. With a full six weeks of winter still to get through, it’s no wonder we get so excited about the prognostications of a certain groundhog.
Outside, beyond the snowdrops, the road salt dissolves the skin of ice only to be washed to the shoulder by the sweep of the spring rains. In July, the blacktop sends up shivers of heat so that, just for an instant, it looks as if there are tinsel streamers blowing on the horizon. And there we are, driving over the hot, treacly asphalt, petroleum fumes thick in the nose, entertaining memories of Christmas. Were we really visited by all those spirits, or was it just a dream? Ask the spirits themselves and they might tell us, “Yes, it was all a dream,” for, really, the spirits don’t want to intrude: that is why they limit their visits to just a handful of days a year.
What would the children say if they could speak of such things? Most children rush headlong into Christmas without a care or backward glance. It’s the others you want to watch: the boy who goes stiff and unsmiling as he’s hoisted onto Santa’s lap, the girl who approaches her stuffed stocking on Christmas morning with a sense of trepidation even though she can plainly see the doleful-eyed beanie baby staring out over the cuff. Those children know. That stocking, which appears unremarkable to adult eyes, has obviously been stuffed through supernatural agency and must therefore be handled with care. Once the toys have been unloaded and unwrapped, they will belong to the child, but until then, they belong to the Otherworld. Can’t you see how the patterned Christmas paper, last handled by elves, still pulsates with magic? And what about the old man himself? How can he still be so spry, so alive, after two thousand years?
He can’t be, not properly.
It’s all right to accept presents from Santa Claus, these children would tell you, just as it was and is all right to accept gifts from the Christmas Child, Barborka, and Epiphany Witch, for these are our rewards, our incentives, for staying on our own side of the veil. It is patently not all right to wait up for the gift-giver, to sneak a peak under that screen of hair or bushel of tulle, or to follow the visitors out the door when they go. It is forbidden to dance with them, to eat at their table, and even, in some cases, to address them directly. The problem is not that the spirits cannot be engaged or looked upon in all their horror or glory, but that they ought not to be, not yet. If you have questions for them, if you would know more, you have only to wait a little—not an eternity, just the space of a lifetime.
47. Mary’s postpartum purification at the Temple was the blueprint for the medieval Christian “churching” of women forty days after they had given birth.
48. These are the opening lines of Robert Herrick’s 1670 poem “Ceremony upon Candlemas Eve,” which is a short version of his “Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve.”