Day 13 of Quotes - Nature and Nostalgia

Thirteen quotes for Sunday, 13th December, 2020. I have shamelessly taken all of these from my first book, "Child of the Isle", a memoir, and my third book, "Child of the Earth", which is nature-writing. (My second book is for young children, "Rosie Jane and the Swodgerump", and last month naughty Rosie Jane and her kind friend, Jessica, reappeared in "Rosie Jane's Christmas Carol".)

If you enjoy the following quotations, please consider reading my monthly blog, "What's It Like Up There?", at susancrowauthor.blogspot.com.

The first nine quotes are from Child of the Isle -

"The Epworth Bells" on 22nd December, 1917, gave this advice to its readership:
'As Christmas purchases are now in full swing, it is not too early, perhaps, to enter a word of appeal and reminder in regard to them. No one wants to destroy the season's tradition of festivity, which in these trying days may well be allowed to "do its bit" in keeping our hearts up. But all self-respecting people ought to set their faces against the tendency to turn festivity into the channels of excessive eating and drinking.' "

"Worst Christmas memories? Well, the ones we can laugh about anyway! Our first Christmas as parents has to have a mention here. We decided to leave buying the Christmas tree until Christmas Eve - we thought it would be romantic and traditional - but it turned out to be a very silly idea - and we've never done it since! We traipsed around the appropriate shops in and around Doncaster, along the market and everywhere we passed, on the way home to Crowle, which might have had even a tiny scraggy tree - but there was no tree to be found. Fortunately my Auntie Gwen called to see Baby on his first Christmas Eve and we related the sad tale of the absent tree. She went home and sought out her old artificial tree for us. What a Christmas star!"

"In those days, while living in Orkney, we made tape recordings of all of us - more of us as the years went by - singing carols and Christmas songs, reading poems, stories and passages from the Bible to send to Granny in Crowle as a pre-Christmas present."

"Grandad Bobby used to tell us about his Christmas stocking with such elation that he almost became a little boy again. In his stocking there would be an orange in the toe, some nuts and an apple, a few sweets and a toy. One toy. And it fitted into a stocking. So it wasn't a train set or a remote controlled boat or even an Xbox!"

"Our grown-up children (the ones who are with us for Christmas) still hang up the same stockings they did through their childhood Christmasses - Daddy's old walking socks. I have mended them and re-attached their hanging loops countless times but the children really don't want up-to-date replacements."

"Granny Ivy was a first rate cook and Christmas dinner was perfection. Granny cooked the dinner in the oven attached to the fireplace in the living room and also in her small electric oven in the scullery with the pudding steaming away on the hob."

"The uneaten cake was put away in a tin and sometimes there was still a little left for Mike's birthday at the beginning of March."

"A Lincolnshire tea table at Christmas wasn't complete without a plate of buttered plum bread. Margarine just wasn't acceptable. And there was no Flora Buttery in those days!"

"We weren't allowed into her house though - until we had sung carols at the door - and they always had to include 'Away In A Manger'."

The following four quotes are from "Child of the Earth" -

"The moon over the square is a picture. It is worth a second look. The colours around it, and those along the edges of scant clouds, are soft and soothing. Blues and greys with silvery pinks."

"Another December walk, this time along the cliff, yielded a moving tapestry of thousands of wheeling starlings gathering to roost. An impressive spectacle, seemingly never-ending as group after group joined the black mass of circling bodies to eventually settle at the chosen resting place. These flocks, grouping and regrouping at the cliff's edge, will remain with me as I contemplate the delights of December."

"In the black of the evening, the stars will prod the sky with their spits of silver until morning, when pinks and pale blues are born of the night and linger until the brownish violet of the snow clouds replace them. "

"For those of us who find ourselves lost in an existence which is not controlled by man and have no inclination to be rescued, 'The Huron Carol' acknowledges Gitchi Manitou, the Supreme God, as the Father of all. It gives thanks for the little Jesus who, for over two thousand years, has marked out the path for us with positive footprints."