Grumpy During the Christmas Eve

Uncle Richie is a grumpy old man who hates Christmas as if, he always seemed to see the mortality of the planet during this season. As I watched the Christmas air blew over the curtains, I knew that in his bones there was this feeling of death of civilizations, like Paris buried in snow, the Grand Canal and the Thames frozen over, major cities abandoned, and few survivors huddled over a fire of chair and table legs. I did not know exactly why he hates this day of the year, this cruel, this dolorous, this death of hope. Cheer, valor, all good feelings had been extinguished in him by the cold night.

I saw Isobel, his little darling daughter, came up to him as if trying to cast the hour into the future, to invent some gentle thraw, that a clement wind would come, that tulips and hyacinths would bloom, that she could hung the plump stars of the night around the tree of heaven – but Uncle Richie felt instead the chill of the night, the ice age in his bones and in the painful beating of his heart. I felt sorry for him for he had no choice but to spend it with us.