Light On Dark Water

Continuing

The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder…
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree…
So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience….
So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
(By “eightieth” meaning whichever is the last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Cultivation of Christmas
Trees”

I was a child in 1954 when Eliot wrote those lines, and I
can’t say that I experience the Christmas tree as I did
then. But neither must I say that my pleasure in it has
disappeared, and I certainly have not forgotten my
childhood experience. There is a great mystery
in the fact that no one would recognize that
six-year-old as me, and yet the consciousness that beheld
the tree in 1954 is the same one that beholds another
tree in 2005. To sit quietly looking at the tree remains one of
the deeper pleasures of Christmas for me, one for which there are
often more opportunities in the days of Christmas following Christmas
Day itself, which is to say during Christmas proper. In other words,
this is only the beginning.