An English Christmas

Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon.  I've had a week of quietly wonderful Christmas followed by a week of solitude in Oxford, and now the friends are starting to reappear.  English Christmas #1: success.

With the end of Michaelmas Term came the mass exodus from Oxford.  Undergraduates were forcibly ejected and replaced with townies who buzzed around doing their Christmas shopping downtown.  There are Christmas trees and lights everywhere, and the town is lit beautifully at night.

There were several gatherings of friends and outings for tea, and one at a time most people eventually went home for Christmas.  I spent the week of Christmas in Ipswich, which is in the east of the country.  The city was beautiful, the week restful, and the company excellent.  I stayed in a vicarage with the vicar and even weaseled my way into the church choir.  Unfortunately by that point I had been suffering from the Plague for about two weeks, so my voice was in shreds, but we made it work.

Christmas Eve brought the midnight mass.  I put on about seven layers of robes and gowns and medals and other assorted choral garments and came out looking like one of the Vienna Choirboys.  The experience led me to a new theory:  It is now my belief that Anglican folk wear this getup less out of ceremony and tradition, and more out of a desire to stay warm in those freezing stone churches.  Twentieth-century heating is only marginally effective in these ancient buildings, but after putting on about fourteen wool dresses with nine hundred buttons down the front, you start to feel quite cozy.

Thusly attired, I followed the Initiated into the back of the church and, having had a total of an hour's experience with the entire repertoire and no idea of the choreography, sight read my way through the service.  There's no experience quite like winging it in front of an audience.  One feels...awake.

The service on Christmas morning was a bit easier, but there was still a fair amount of sight reading.  The choir director made a fascinating choice in repertoire that morning when, upon being presented with a choir of about fifteen women and exactly two men, he decided this was the perfect opportunity to sing the Byrd Three-Part Mass, which was written for all men and has a bass part, a tenor part, and a treble part.  Imagine, if you will, the scene in the vestry as we hastily rehearsed this, with fifteen church ladies screaming for Jesus, and one tenor and one bass each singing for all he was worth.  I volunteered to double the size of the tenor section by joining it myself--I was sight reading anyway, and it looked like fun.  So we did that.

We returned to the vicarage for the rest of the Christmas Day routine.  The menu:

• Presents and soup crackers
• Christmas dinner (with Christmas crackers, paper hats, bread sauce, and Brussels sprouts being among the essential ingredients)
• The ceremonial Christmas Nap
• A walk in the park
• The Queen's Christmas speech on TV (absolute silence and appropriate reverence are required; my singing of the lyrics of "My Country 'Tis of Thee" to the instrumental performance of "God Save the Queen" was unwelcome.  From every mountainside let freedom ring.)
• The eating of the Christmas log
• The skyping of the family in St. Louis
• Downton Abbey Christmas special on ITV.  Andy seemed less enraptured than the rest of us and slept through most of it.

There was one note of sadness throughout this wonderful day.  My little dog Kaiser, my precious friend of ten years and the treasure I longed for since I was about five years old, had to be put down unexpectedly on Christmas morning after a very rough night.  He was the best companion I could possibly ask for: cheerful, playful, always happy to see us, getting joy out of the simplest things, doing his best all the time; a creature without sin, and I loved him.  I am grateful that we could help him by making his suffering stop.

The rest of the week in Ipswich was just as good.  We had a second Christmas on Boxing Day with the rest of the family.  One highlight of the week was a day trip we took to Bury St Edmunds to see the remains of a huge abbey pulverized by Henry VIII.  My inner eight-year-old was indulged as I climbed over and around and through the eerie landscape.

Oxford has been quiet in the week since I returned, but the solitude has given me a chance to deal with Kaiser and talk with my family a lot.  Friends are now starting to return, and everyone is gearing up for Hilary term.  I'm ready: let's do this.