How Lovely Are Thy Branches

Looks like it.

Kit’s pop turned a page in the paper and frowned absently at the contents. “So about all that noise in the middle of the night…” he said conversationally.

“Noise?” said Kit.

“Some kind of racket outside, seems like,” Dairine said. “I missed it. Must have been asleep.”

“Got a text from the hospital this morning,” Kit’s mama said, completely straightfaced. “The boys from next door turned up in the ER at four AM or thereabouts. Alcohol poisoning, apparently: their blood alcohol was well up, anyway. Might have been drugs too, though the tox screens apparently didn’t show anything.”

“Do tell,” said Dairine.

“Yes. Seems they were babbling about giant demon trees with a million eyes.”

Everybody turned to glance thoughtfully at the Christmas tree in the living room. The Christmas tree stretched its limbs gently, causing all the tinsel on it to ripple and a few ornaments to clunk gently together, and settled back into its big bucket of rooting compound again.

“You fall asleep with the wrong movie channel on,” Nita said, “there’s no telling what kind of dreams you might have. Especially if you’d been drinking.”

“Mmm,” said Kit’s mama, taking another drink of her coffee.

“I wonder what they’ll do now,” Kit’s pop said.

Kit shook his head, finishing his cereal. “First guess?” he said. “Leave everybody’s Christmas decorations strictly alone after this. Maybe the mailboxes’ll even catch a break.”

In the living room, Filif rustled. “That was more or less the injunction…”

“Well,” Nita said “you didn’t absolutely mandate it.“

“No,” Filif said. “That would probably have required more power than I was willing to expend at that particular moment. And psychotropic wizardries do require heavy energy expenditure, typically to prevent them being misused as much as anything else.” He rustled his boughs reflectively, and even the non-blinking lights twinkled. “Let’s just consider it… a very strong suggestion.”

Nita laughed softly. “If that was a suggestion,” she said, “remind me not to be around when you order somebody to do something.”

“In any case, an unexpected gift,” Kit’s pop said.

His mama nodded in agreement. “In the spirit of the season…”

“So what’s on today’s agenda?” said Ronan.

“Easygoing holiday sloth,” said Kit’s pop.

“Continuation of the Christmas Movie Marathon,” Dairine said. “Love Actually, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank, Home Alone, Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, and A Christmas Story.”

“‘You’ll shoot your eye out’!” Darryl crowed (twice).

“Carols this evening,” said Kit’s mama. “You are all invited. You,” she said, pointing at Ronan, “are required. As many of you as want to come along… we’ll find room for you.” She looked over at Sker’ret. “Wonder if we could disguise you somehow?”

In a blink or so a young dark-haired guy of about fifteen, in jeans and a jacket and a T-shirt underneath that said LINEAR TIME IS TOO A LIFESTYLE CHOICE was leaning against the table where Sker’ret had been, with a startling purple streak in his shaggy mop. “Probably we can come up with something,” he said.

Kit’s mama and pop stared. Then his mama said, “Can you sing?”, and his pop went back to his paper.

Nita put a last few pancakes on the griddle, checked its temperature, and left them to get on with cooking, then wandered out to the living room. Filif watched her come, and rustled his branches a little. “So has this gone as expected?” she said.

“Better,” he said, all his eyes shining.

“Got it all figured out yet?”

Filif laughed at her. “First impressions, perhaps, and admittedly superficial. …Though there are some similarities to the Outlier’s Time. …Joy. The memory of joy. Loss, and the memory of it.”

Nita breathed out, looking at the one ornament that shone like Earth at its full. “And getting past it,” Nita said, very low.

“Or getting through it,” Filif said. “Does anyone ever get ‘past’? I wonder. Why would you want to pass by old joy, or sweet memories that now cause you pain, without greeting them, as if they were just someone in a crowd at the Crossings? It seems rude.”

Nita nodded. “Sounds true.”

They were quiet together for a moment. Finally Filif said, “You have to come up to the Nightless Days festival with me some time,” he said. “The family will want to meet you. More concretely than last night, anyway.”

“I’d really like that,” Nita said.

“So would I, coz,” Filif said. “As family can plainly become extended in mysterious ways. Doubtless the Powers’ plan for us, meant to compensate for the ways our schedules become otherwise disrupted.”

“It’s so true,” Nita said, looking back toward the kitchen, and Kit.

“Meantime,” Filif said. “About Christmas. I keep forgetting to ask. How long does this go on?”

Nita was just opening her mouth when Kit’s mama put her head through the passthrough.

“Twelve days,” she said.

Filif looked at Nita. “It’ll take at least that long to sort out this Santa Claus character,” he said. “Let’s get started.”

Afterword

How Lovely Are Thy Branches has been in progress, on and off, for several years. It was first conceived in 2011 while I was working on the “outline” for the “Christmas special” The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank, which appears here; and it was in relation to the outline that HLATB was first mentioned, at the bottom of this post. (Six Tasks is of course itself a somewhat thinly veiled joke about / reference to other Christmas specials such as the classic Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year. Many thanks again to Bob Schooley for his assistance with matters relating to Hank.)

Much of this work was written to Christmas music, as you might imagine. An informal playlist, referring to the chapter titles:

“We Need A Little Christmas” : The song comes from the musical Mame. Here is Angela Lansbury singing the lead vocal on the original 1966 Broadway cast recording, or here in live performance with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir & Orchestra. Or here at Amazon.

“Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow” A classic written by Sammy Cohn and Jule Styne when they were trapped in Hollywood during a heat wave, and covered since then by almost everybody you can think of. The original Vaughn Monroe recording of the old favorite (probably best known these days for turning up at the end of Die Hard) is here. A smooth-but-upbeat Big Band-era, boogie-woogie-ish rendition by Frank Sinatra is here. For something more recent, try Idina Menzel’s cover.

“O Come, All Ye Faithful”: The English-language restatement of the Latin title Adeste Fideles. Hugely popular in both the English and Latin versions. The “Three Tenors” version here contains both. A 1950s-ish cover by Mario Lanza is here.

“O Tannenbaum”: Dissected here in some detail by the participants. German-language versions worth listening to are this one by Andrea Bocelli — in Italian, with different words again — and this one by Nana Mouskouri….For many North Americans, the best-known version is the famous instrumental from A Charlie Brown Christmas, performed by the Vince Guaraldi Trio.

“Bring A Torch, Jeanette, Isabella” (): Traditional, French, and four centuries old, give or take a few decades; possibly better known these days as an instrumental than a vocal (though here is a typical vocal rendition by the Robert Shaw Chorale. One cheerful instrumental cover is this one by Loreena McKennitt.

“In The Bleak Midwinter” (): Relatively new as carols go; written by the poet Christina Rosetti in the 1870s, and set to music by numerous composers including Gustav Holst, who did what’s probably now the best-known setting. Another nice version is this Allison Crowe cover.

“I’ll Be Home For Christmas”: Its original 1943 recording by Bing Crosby (the B side of “White Christmas”) remains a watershed, but many many other artists have covered it over the years. The Frank Sinatra cover is worth hearing, as is the Michael Bublé one.

Some other minor issues:

Bubble lights: See the incredible patent hoohah surrounding the introduction (and shameless pirating) of these lights here.

The fire kink: The special Christmas tree candle holders that Markus goes back to fetch from his home in (somewhere near Freiburg) can be seen here at the website of that superlative online (and offline) German department store, Manufactum:. Older solutions to the candles-on-the-tree problem can be seen here at OldChristmasTreeLights.com

The Winter Solstice lunar eclipse of 2010: The first time the Solstice coincided with a total lunar eclipse since the 1990s: the next such coincidence will not occur until 2094. Details of this eclipse can be found here at Fred Espenak’s excellent website.