...and children listen to hear sleighbells in the snow...

The holidays came too early this year. I'm not ready for there to be holiday music on the radio and in TV commercials BEFORE Halloween. However, inspired by the sight of an overnight dusting of snow on our back yard lawn, the "spirit" hit me this morning in the shower when I heard the words of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" issuing from my own pipes.

I'm not a religious or spiritual person. Okay, I'll say it at risk of losing my new blogger friends: I am atheist. I'm not militant about it. Christians, Jews, Muslims... you can all worship freely around me. It's just not my bag. Part of me thinks I should write it "X-mas," but the holiday was not named for a fictional/real person named "X." But that's not what this post is about.

I'm not religious. The "Christmas Spirit" within me harks back to my childhood when the brainwashing had its hold of me and I believed, and my parents were young and my siblings were all living at home and we'd wake up in our pajamas and sprint to the Christmas tree to see what Santa had left under it, and surely there was a Santa because our parents couldn't afford to buy us so many toys! I still have warm thoughts about that holiday because that's when the family gets together for a huge meal. Everyone's together, laughing, smiling, digesting. That's Christmas for me. Togetherness.

It's interesting that probably the most famous modern song to commemorate the Christian holiday was written by a Jew! He captured the heart of the holiday in his lyrics, the spirit of the holiday without being spiritual. The Santa side of it instead of the Christ side of it. But what this post is about is literally the title of the post. Have you ever heard the sleighbells during a gentle snowfall? I have.

I was in fifth grade. It had to be December, likely less than a week before Christmas. The sixth grade bully, Tim Pfeiffer (pronounced "PY-fer"), had threatened me with a pummeling after school when he and I tangled going after a ball at recess. I had made every effort to get out the doors as quickly as possible to be out of sight by the time Tim remembered he was scheduled to flatten me. He had quite a busy fight schedule, did Tim. But something happened to delay me, and I was trembling from the fear of facing him. I had a friend with me who was there for moral support more than anything. Someone to wipe up the blood and call an ambulance when the fists stopped flying. I can't remember today who that friend was. It must not have been my best friend because at the time he was fearless. He would have taken on a moving car if he thought he had heard it threaten him or one of his friends. No, this friend was there to watch, take notes for the school newspaper, and make splints.

The only non-violent, defensive move I could think of at the moment was to leave through a different door than I usually did, this one being the school's main entrance. It had started snowing earlier in the day, and by the time school let out, there was about an inch or two of accumulation, on the sidewalks as well as on the grass, so this was a real snowfall. My friend and I walked outside and there was no Tim Pfeiffer. Instead, out there was a calm I had seldom experienced in that small suburb of Chicago. The snowflakes drifted silently to the others that had preceded them to create the white blanket beneath our feet. And either traffic and wind had ceased moving everywhere within a half-mile radius of the school, or the snowfall was so quieting that I could hear myself breathing a sigh of relief that I wasn't being battered by a pair of sixth-grader fists.

And then I heard them. Call it the magic a 10-year-old feels in a white landscape as the white still falls around him, but I heard them. I stopped breathing in order to make sure I heard them. Sleigh bells. Somewhere off in the distance, in no particular direction, a jing-jing-jingling that almost wasn't there, somewhere. Convinced I was hearing things, I stepped forward to go home, my feet crunching on the fresh snow, when my friend said, "Stop! SHH!" I froze. He stood with his arms out at 45-degree angles, appearing to try to still the air with his hands as he listened. "Do you hear that?"

"The bells?" I said.

"Yeah!"

It was ghostly. They faded away, and then back in again, just to the outer edges of our hearing, and finally they were gone. The streets had been plowed, nobody in the area that I was aware of owned horses, let alone a sleigh. And who would ring sleighbells from their front yard while the snow fell?

I don't know if Mr. Berlin meant the same thing when he wrote that line in that perhaps most famous of his songs, or if he simply meant that there really were sleighbells ringing for the children to hear. But when that moment from my childhood came back to me this morning in the shower as my lips formed the words, when I realized that once, just once, I was one of those children who listened to hear sleighbells in the snow, and I heard them, the Christmas Spirit and all of its childhood magic was upon me.

Happy holidays to you, whichever of them you choose to celebrate, however you choose to celebrate them.


dassall


(...and I never got that beating. Tim Pfeiffer had forgotten about me. He must have had more important kids to thrash in his busy beating schedule.)