When I was very young, the older folks still had a Christmas tradition of singing carols together. Everyone would be gathered in the house on Christmas night—parents and aunts and uncles and great aunts and great uncles and various other people of unknown relation, and of course children—and at some point after dinner everyone would gather on the stairway, like a choir on tiers, and we would sing Silent Night and Joy to the World and Hark the Herald Angels and God Rest Ye Mer...ry Gentlemen. There was no TV in those days. People sang instead, and laughed, and did a lot of hugging and kissing. And then there would be dessert—chess pie and pumpkin pie and mincemeat pie and whipped cream; and salted peanuts and cashews and almonds and horrible hazelnuts brought in a basket by the neighbor; and colored mints and gumdrops and licorice sticks and little candycanes that had previously hung on the tree. And then one year, when I was perhaps ten, those Christmases suddenly disappeared. And there has never been anything quite like them since.
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