Chateau of Echoes by Siri L. Mitchell

Author:Siri L. Mitchell [Mitchell Siri]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: prose_contemporary

21

Cranwell must have followed my advice, because by dinner, he’d suspended balls of mistletoe around the chateau. There was one dangling from every arched doorway on the ground floor. I saw them as I came down from my room to serve dinner.

They were festive, but they made me wince. Holidays hurt. Holidays were markers, days that occurred each year in which thoughts turned to how you celebrated in years past, and with whom. For a person like me, holidays were a point in time at which you were forced to reconcile the life you used to have with the life you now lived.

Christmas with Peter had been cozy. Christmas à deux. Our Christmases for two had consisted of traditions we both found meaningful. That meant chocolate truffles instead of cookies; jazz instead of carols; Life is Beautiful or Amelie of Montmartre instead of It’s a Wonderful Life. Sometimes even exotic vacations to Morocco or the Canary Islands. Our holiday had ambience, but no religion. And looking back on those years, I realized I had missed the wonder of Christmas and the contemplation of the divine. I missed meditating on the sacred moment when God reached down and touched the earth.

Peter viewed Christmas as an opportunity to ease the collective guilt our culture had accumulated throughout the year. If people were really as kindhearted as they pretended to be at Christmas, then he thought food pantries and soup kitchens should be stocked and staffed year-round at consistent levels. If people hadn’t kept in touch with their friends for eleven of the year’s months, then they used the twelfth one to make up for it, clogging the postal system with holiday-themed junk mail. If companies hadn’t paid their employees a fair wage, then they distributed a Christmas bonus to make themselves look like heroes instead of misers. Poor man. He wasn’t as churlish as his rhetoric made him sound.

Peter and I had talked about the religious heritage of Christmas. I had asked him, just for the sake of argument, what was so wrong about humanity’s desire to communicate with heaven. And, for the sake of argument, we’d had an argument about Christianity’s exclusiveness and other religions’ tolerance. But the argument had ended when he reminded me that not only didn’t he place faith in any God, but he also didn’t even believe a God existed. I’d never before stopped to consider how very great a distance there was between believing in something and believing nothing. There may have been less of a culture clash had I been married to a Hindu or Muslim. At least we both would have been approaching life with the idea that there was some sort of higher purpose for it all.

There was a profound difference in our attitudes toward others. Peter wanted to review the financial statements of any nonprofit he was contemplating donating funds to. I was much more spontaneous. If I glimpsed TV coverage of a disaster, if I were stopped on the street by some collegian canvassing for rights in Third World countries, I always gave what I could.

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