Hej RM..

Sådan er dét, jep ;)

Oh, hvor sneen daler, og man skæver umærkeligt til Højholts solsort; hvor er det nisseligt! Og så kræver det selvfølgelig en lille julehistorie, endda fra en storartet fortæller, voila:

Richard Burton’s ‘A Christmas Story’

There were not many white Christmases in our part of Wales in my childhood-perhaps only one or two--but Christmas cards and Dickens and Dylan Thomas and wishful memory have turned them all into white. I don't know why there should have so few in such a cold, wet land-the nearness of the sea, perhaps.The Atlantic, by way of the Bristol Channel, endlessly harried us with gale and tempest. Perhaps they blew the snow over us to the Black Mountains and Snowdonia and England.
Most of the Christmases of my childhood seem the same, but one of them I remember particularly, because it departed from the seemingly inexorable ritual. On this Eve of Christmas, Mad Dan, my uncle, the local agnostic, feared for his belief but revered for his brilliantly active vocabulary in the half-alien English tongue, sat in our kitchen with a group of men and with biting scourge and pithy whip drove the great cries of history, the epoch-making, world-changing ones, out of the temple of time. they were all half-truths, he said, and therefore half-lies.
I sat and stoned raisins for the pudding and listened bewitched to this exotic foreign language, this rough and r-riddled, rolling multisyllabic English.
" 'There is only one Christian and he died upon the Cross,' said Nietzsche," said Dan.
Nietzsche, I thought - a Japanese. Perhaps he can speak Japanese, I thought. it was said that he, Dan, knew Latin and Greek, and could write both of them backwards.
"Can you speak Japanese, Mad Dan?"I asked.
"Shut up, Solomon," he said to me.
" 'Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains,' " he said. "Irresponsible rubbish. Cries written by crabbed fists on empty tables from mean hearts.
" 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.' "
"What's that?" I asked.
"Latin, Copperfield," he said "meaning it is sweetly bloody marvellous to die for your country.
" 'Man is born free and is everywhere in chains' -- golden-tongued, light-brained, heedlessness of consequences.
" 'I think, therefore I am' -- Descartes."
"French," I guessed.



"Right, Seth," he said. Thou shalt have a Rolls-Royce and go to Oxford and never read a book again.
" 'I think, therefore I am,' " with scorn. "Wallace the fruiterer-he who sells perishable goods after they have perished to Saturday night idiots--might well say of them, 'They do not think, therefore they are not, they buy perishable goods after they have perished.' "
Out of the welter of names and quotations ( Mad Dan's "My personal leaden treasury of the human tragedy") the cries, the references rolled out endlessly. he said that Martin Luther should have had a diet of worms. Why, I thought, why should the man eat worms?
"Can you eat worms? I asked.
"Not as readily as the worms will eat you," he said. he roared with delight at this incomprehensible joke. he had become more and more burning and bright. he said he had a cold, and took some more medicine from a little bottle in his pocket.
This was as it should be. Uncle Dan had been talking ever since I could remember. until this moment Christmas was Christmas as it always had been. But then my sister's husband, cheekboned, hollowed, sculptured, came into the room.
"Alright right, boys," he said, "off you go-take the boy with you."
"Where to?" I asked.
"Just go with Dan and behave yourself," he said.
"Where's my sister?" I said
"Never mind," he said, "Go you."



I went out into the night with Dan and the other men.
Why were they sending me out at this time of night on Christmas Eve?
My mother had died when I was two years old, and I had lived with my sister and her husband ever since. i had had lots of Christmases since my mother's death, and they could already be relied on, they had always been the same. There was the growing excitement of Uncle Ben's Christmas Club ( you paid a sixpence or shilling a week throughout the year ), and the choosing from the catalogue--Littlewood's Catalogue.There was the breathless guessing at what Santa Claus would bring. What was in those brown paper parcels on top of the wardrobe? Would it be a farm with pigs in a sty, and ducks on a metal pond, and five-barred gates, and metal trees, and Kentucky fences, and a horse or two, and several cows, and a tiny bucket and a milk-maid, and a farmhouse complete with red-faced farmer and wife in the window? And a chimney on top? Pray God it wasn't Tommy Elliot's farm, which I'd played with for two years and which I feared--from whispers that I'd caught between my sister and Mrs.Elliot--was going to be cleaned up and bought for me for Christmas. It would be shameful to have a secondhand present. Everybody would know. it must be, if a farm at all, a spanking-new one, gleaming with fresh paint, with not a leaden base showing through.
And I would spend an hour singing Christmas carol duets from door to door with my friend Trevor, picking up a penny here and a ha'penny there. and then home at nine o'clock, perhaps to gossip with my sister and eat more nuts, and be sent to bed sleepless and agog. and now, at the time of getting to bed, I was being sent out into the night with Mad Dan and his audience--all of them with Christmas colds, and all of them drinking medicine out of little bottles kept in their inside pockets.
We went to the meeting ground of our part of the village. It was called "The End". It was a vacant stretch of stony ground between two rows of cottages--Inkerman and Balaclava. Both the Inkerman people and the Balaclava people called it "The End". Insularity, I realize now, streetophobia--to each street it was "The End". It should have been called "The Middle".
The miners had built a bonfire and stood around it, burning on one side and frozen on the other. Chestnuts and--because there had been plenty of work that year--potatoes were roasted to blackness, and eaten sprinkled with salt, smoky and steaming straight from the fire. And Mad Dan, making great gestures against the flames, told the half-listening, silent, munching miners of the lies we had been told for thousands of years, the mellifluous advice we had been told to take.
Turn the other cheek. turn the other cheek, boys, and get your bloody brain broken. Suffer all my children. this side of the river is torment and torture and starvation, and don't forget the sycophancy to the carriaged and horsed, the Daimlered, the bare-shouldered, remote beauties in many mansions, gleaming with the gold we made for them. Suffer all my baby-men, beat out, with great coal-hands, the black melancholy of the hymns. When you die and cross that stormy river, that roaring Jordan, there will be unimaginable delights, and God shall wipe away all tears, and there will be no more pain. Lies! Lies! Lies!"



The night was getting on. Christmas was nearly here. Dan was boring now, and sometimes he didn't make sense, and he was repeating himself. What was in those parcels on top of the wardrobe, and why had I been sent out so late on Christmas Eve? I wanted to go home.
"Can I go home how, Mad Dan?"
"Shut your bloody trap and listen," he said, "or I'll have you apprenticed to a haberdasher."
This was a fate worse than death to a miner's son. There was, you understand, the ambition for the walk of the miners in corduroy trousers, with yorks under the knees to stop the loose coal running down into your boots and the rats from running up inside your trousers and biting your belly ( or worse ), and the lamp in the cap on the head, and the bandy, muscle-bound strut of the lords of the coalface. There was the ambition to be one of those blue-scarred boys at the street corner on Saturday night with a half a crown in the pocket and, secure in numbers, whistle at the girls who lived in the residential area. The doctor's, the lawyer's, the headmaster's daughter.
And Dan roared on. he said he believed nothing and believed everything. That he knew nothing and knew everything. He said he was the Voltaire of Aberavon. He wept once or twice, and the silent miners chewed and stared uneasily. Crying was for women, or for preachers when talking of God's magnanimity, his mercy, his love. Miners did not weep--not even gabby miners like Mad Dan, who evaded work whenever he could. Mad Dan, with passionate eloquence, had long been an advocate of frequent and lasting strikes. Life was too rough to cry about.
I tried to sneak out of the circle around the bonfire and make my way home, but one of the miners caught me by the ear and brought me painfully back. "You'll go home when we go home," he said.
Dan didn't speak anymore--he chuntered on--that is to say he would have been mumbling into his beard, had he had a beard. There came out of the grey embers of his dying oratory occasional flashes of coherence.
"Who sent the slave back to his master?"
"Was St. Paul a Christian?"
And, with snarling sarcasm, "There was an Israelite indeed in whom there was much guile."
" 'Give me liberty or give me death.' "
" 'Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath.' "
The wind, tigerish, now crouched, now circled, now menaced the bonfire. and the bonfire, now rearing back down from, now roaring back at the wind, would send showers of sparks and smoke and coloured flame up the endless open chimney of the night. I was bored and bewildered. I pondered on some of the half-baked things that Mad Dan had been saying--he talked like a book, they said of him. What did Mad Dan mean about cries being lies? Anyway his cries didn't such much like cries to me. They sounded like sentences. Cries were screams and things like that when somebody twisted your arm or busted your nose.How could "Turn the other cheek" be a cry? or "God is love" or "The wages of sin is death"? I dimly guessed what time in mist confounds. Why was the Twenty-third Psalm a poem of incomparable beauty? The teacher in school had said it was. I puzzled about this, too. It didn't rhyme. How could it be a poem if it didn't rhyme?
What were the cries? How could something be a half-truth? Why were cries lies? Why couldn't I go home? Why was I kept out so late on Christmas Eve, when Holy Santa was due any time after midnight? I dimly guessed what time in mist confounds.



Why had my sister been upstairs all this night on Christmas Eve when I was home? Why wasn't she peeling potatoes, or something? Why were two of my aunties sitting in the parlour, and with them Mrs.Tabor T.B.--she who wore her husband's cap on back to front? Why did they talk low? I dimly guessed. Was my sister dead? Dying? I loved my sister--sometimes with an unbearable passion.
I suddenly knew that she was dying.
"Is my sister dying, Mad Dan? I said.
"We are all dying, Nebuchadnezzar," he said. "Even your growing pains are reaching into oblivion.She'll last the night, Dyfrig," he said. "She'll last the night."
Now my sister was no ordinary woman--no woman ever is, but to me, my sister less than any. When my mother had died, she, my sister, had become my mother, and more mother to me than any mother could have been. I was immensely proud of her. I shone in the reflection of her green-eyed, black-haired, gypsy beauty. She sang at her work in a voice so pure that the local men said she had a bell in every tooth, and was gifted by God. And these pundits who revelled in music of any kind and who had agreed many times, with much self-congratulations, that of all instruments devised by man, crwth, violin, pibcorn, dulcimer, viola, church organ, zither, harp, brass band, wood-wind, or symphony orchestra--they had smugly agreed that there was no noise as beautiful at its best as the sound of the human voice.
She had a throat that should have been coloured with down like a small bird, and eyes so hazel-green and open that, to preserve them from too much knowledge of evil, they should have been hooded and vultured and not, as they were, terrible in their vulnerability. She was innocent and guileless and infinitely protectable. She was naive to the point of saintliness, and wept a lot at the misery of others. She felt all tragedies except her own. I had read of the Knights of Chivalry and I knew that I had a bounden duty to protect her above all other creatures. It wasn't until thirty years later; when I saw her in another woman, that I realized that I had been searching for her all my life.
Why had I been sent out? When would they let me go home? Why were my aunties there, and Mr.Tabor T.B.? ( She was called Mrs.Tabor T.B. because she'd had eight children, all of whom had died in their teens of tuberculosis. She was slightly mad, I think, and would mutter to herself, "It wasn't Jack or me. T.B. was in the walls. The council should have had that house fumigated. The T.B. was in the walls.")
Mad Dan was silent now. His stoned eyes stared into the fire. A little spittle guttered quietly from the corner of his mouth.
"Let's have a song, boys," he said slowly. "Stay me with minims, comfort me with crotchets."
The crag-faced miners sang with astonishing sweetness a song about a little engine.
"Cranshaw Bailey had an engine;
It was full of mighty power.
He was pull a little lever;
It was go five miles an hour.
Was you ever see,
Was you ever see,
Such a funny thing before?"



They sang a song about what you could see from the hills of Jerusalem; they sang a song about a saucepan--of a green hill far away, without a city wall; of a black pig and how necessary and how dreadful it was to kill it; of the shepherds and the Magi. Mad Dan stared, and I sang soprano.
There was a disturbance outside the fire's night wall and my auntie Jinnie came suddenly into the light.. Mad Dan stood up.
"All right?" he said.
"Lovely," she said. "Nine pounds--a wench."
"Come, Joseph of Arimathea," he said to me. "Santa called early tonight. Home we go."
We walked a few steps.
"Oh!" he said. "Any of you boys got a piece of silver?A tanner would do, but a crown or a florin would be tidier."
One of the men threw him a florin. "Tell her it's a happy Christmas from Nat Williams, and all that," he said.
We went home. Mrs.Tabor T.B. was downstairs in the kitchen, husband's cap on back to front. My brother-in-law was whistling at the hearth, with the flat iron and the nuts, working steadily. My auntie Jinnie and my cousin Cassie, spinsters both, were arch and coy, and spoke to me as if I were demented and slightly deaf.



"Santy Clausie has brought Richie-Pitchie a prezzy-wezzie for Christmas. Go upstairs and see what Santy has brought you."
I went upstairs with Mad Dan. as I went, Mrs.Tabor T.B. said to my breath-whistling, nut-cracking brother-in -law, "Talk to the council, Elfed," she said, "get them to fumigate the whole house."
I dimly guessed, of course, but there was still a chance that there would be a fire engine, loud-red and big enough for an eight-year old to ride in. The prezzy-wezzy was a furious, red-faced, bald, wrinkled old woman, sixty minutes old.
"Try this for size," said Mad Dan, and pressed the florin into the baby's left hand. She held the money tightly- "You've got a good grip," said Dan to the baby. "She'll never be poor," he said to my sister.
My sister looked washed-out and weak. She smiled at me, and I gave her a kiss.
"Well, what do you think of your Christmas present?" she said
"Fine," I said. "Is this all I get?"
"No, there will be more in the morning."
"O.K.," I said. "Good night, then."
We went downstairs together, and the baby screamed.
"There," said Mad Dan, "'Tis the only cry that is true and immortal and eternal and from the heart. Screaming we come into the world and screaming we go out."
"Well, what do you think of your new sister?" they asked in the kitchen.
"New niece," I said. "Fine."
I went to my bed in the boxroom. The bed was old, and the springs had long ago given up, and sleeping in it was like sleeping in a hammock.
My brother-in -law blew out the candle. "Sleep now," he said. "No lighting the candle and reading." He closed the door and went downstairs.
I pulled the clothes over my head, made a tent, felt for my Woolworth's torch, and with John Halifax, Gentleman propped against my knees, began to read. The Atlantic wind, wild from America whooped and whistled around the house. the baby choked with sobs on the other side of the bedroom wall. I listened. well, at least, I thought, it isn't Tommy Elliot's farm.

- Richard Burton

Bedste hilsner
Nissen
P.s.: spændende valg med muligheder, ikke sandt? ;)

Simon, din nisse

Mens jeg må kæmpe mig igennem din lange tekst på udenlandsk, så får du lov til at kridte dine snesko, spænde dem ekstra godt fast og øve dig i nissestøvletramp og hovsahop omkring lysene på den grønne gren.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoXikjSfzJ8

Jeg finder ordbogen, mens du kridter skoene ... ja, og måske mødes vi så dér på hver side af et julelys og en grankvist :)))

P.s. Gran i håret og julelys i øjnene er sådan, jeg kan genkendes ... og jo, jeg skal nok kigge ned efter dansetrin og kridtspor ;)

Lattermildt med en ordbog i hånden
RoseMarie

Hov, jeg glemte lige at nævne, at dit kodeord er at kunne fremsige og synge alle replikker og sange fra

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoXikjSfzJ8

Vupti ... :)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

Heii RM…

Ufda det er vidunder-lidt koldt – og jep, der skal akkurat snetøj på rødderne til morgen, andet ville være ganske uklædeligt, ja unisseligt! Sneen og den krystalliserede luft får en jublen op i os, og træerne har så godt af igen at få mulighed for indbyrdes at strides om, hvem der med det største svip ka’ få snemasser til at hvirvle højst op i luften – du ved, det smukke syn Højholt så poetisk omtaler i flimsen der snarere sku’ ha’ heddet ’Den bænkede mand’.
Der sker meget i snelandskaber: hastigheden på stor set alle udfoldelser sænkes til et for sindet mere tåleligt niveau, og så får vi jo disse æblekække små rosenkinder, der vel nærmest får os til at ligne små børn der afventer de voksne i herligt lyddæmpede universer, ja jeg glæder mig til at se Fanny & Alexander i julen, ikke mindst p.a. dens begyndelse, hvor julen bare rejser sig som et crescendo, der helt sikkert får mig til at en ligne lykkelig tosse. Joh, det ligner sgu’ en hvid jul RM ;)

Forøvrigt har du helt ret, det er da temmelig strengt at fylde træet her med engelske julestemninger! Men den skid, Mr. Burton altså, havde simpelthen besluttet sig for fransk, italiensk, engelsk og til dels tysk, som de eneste sprogområder der var værd at interessere sig for, åh ja, hertil kommer jo så denne besynderlige lydmasse der ofte stiger op i struben på et folk der kalder sig for welsh – hvad du sikkert har gennemskuet her skal være min undskyldning. Men den lille historie er faktisk fin, og blev desværre den ene af to der udgør hans publikation, hvis man ser bort fra hans i mine øjne herlige dagbøger, som en fornuftig mand altså samlede til den natbordbasse der ligger og venter på at de skide yankee’s ska’ blie færdige med deres opmærksomhedskrævende aktiviteter.

Sjovt er det forøvrigt at se/høre populister fra stort set alle hold, fare i flint over den aggressive tone de oplever i en amerikansk valgkamp, der rigtignok er anderledes og hårdere i tonen, men man skal ikke tage fejl, for uanset den nærmest hadske retorik i anspændte dueller, er alle amerikanere og står vemodigt sammen om nationen USA. Jeg ved ærlig talt ikke hvilken værdighed man kan tillægge europæiske politikere der hverken siger hvad de mener eller mener hvad de siger, men det er åbenbart kæledæggeideen hos vore ”ansvarlige” europæiske politikere/journalister. Spændende blir det at se udfaldet, der har stor betydning for verden omkring os.

Til slut vil jeg lige hæve tomlen for ”mit kodeord” – idet jeg ligefrem mener at den slags hører til almen pli for en agtværdig nissemand/kone! ;)

I ønsket om en god snevejrsdag
Nissen

Halløj i sneen og barndommens land

Sne, sne, lysende sne ... som et smil, der breder sig på fnuglette vinger og bli'r til røde kinder og lys i øjet :))))
Selvfølgelig må den snehvide bog findes frem i dag, og herfa


Jeg indånder sneluft, indånder et verdensrum,
sneen daler, danser mellem træer, danser
under gadelygters lyskegler, sneen har mistet himmelen,

sneen hvirvler gennem rummet, jeg indånder kulde,
indånder renhed, sneen er hvile for sjælen,
tanker stiger op, ekspanderer, men hvert fnug søger

sit tilfældige centrum i verden, snehimlen lægger sig
på jorden, noget rækker ud over kroppens grænse,
noget større er til, end jeg kan omfatte, kun ane ...

Pia Tafdrup "Lugten af sne"

Sne, sne, sne og en anelse om mere sne
RoseMarie