Lighting a cadre of candles to make a stand against the cold, pulling a fuzzy robe a little closer around my neck, and setting up a pot of tea, I conjure the spirit of hygge. This is how we embrace the winter rather than stave it off – the latter being an impossible mission, we might as well admit. The days go much easier when we bend with their general flow instead of fighting against them. I wish I’d understood that a few decades ago.
Here is a little song to echo the blanket of snow that covers the outside world right now.
It’s a muted song, for a muted morning, in a world of blankets. Before the work day begins, and before the sky has lightened and turned whatever shade of gray we will get for the morning, I putter quietly around the living room while the tea kettle warms. Hello, winter, the soul implores, begging for the response to be kind and, dare we wish for such a thing, warm.
Most days there is no answer, such as on this morning. Only quiet and silence and the muted sense that things are in a state of slumber. It’s better than when the answer is a storm, when the winter claps back with a scowl and a threat. Softness is welcome. Kindness appreciated. The lack of an answer is just an answer to another question. Winter winds its madness around the brain like cold hands around a cup of tea.
Hot on the heels of a self-titled debut solo album, Giuliano D’Orazio has actually been a mainstay on the Worcester, MA music scene for years. A self-described queer rock and roll artist, D’Orazio earns this crowning as Dazzler of the Day thanks to the ten glorious songs that collectively comprise the rollicking tour de force of ‘Giuliano’. I can’t remember the last time I was so moved and entranced by an entire album (my favorites include lead track ‘Boy Next Door’, ‘Holy Grail’, and the powerful ‘Don’t Pray for Me’, but every song here is worth repeat listens). Check out D’Orazio’s website here for more information and music.
It was 19 years ago today that Casey Stratton released one of those albums that changed my life in the way that it conveyed exactly what I was thinking and feeling, even before I understood it all myself, in his pivotal work ‘Standing At The Edge’. Since then, I’ve been a fan of his music (he’s recorded 29 albums so far), and the way it has been his constant companion over the past two decades. In honor of this special anniversary, Stratton is crowned as Dazzler of the Day – for all the art he continues to create, and all the souls he has already touched through his work. Check out his website here for more music and beauty.
It was a brutal winter’s night. Fragile but brutal. There was ice dangling in the air, too cold to drip. Smoke curling from the only glow in that darkness – the lit end of a cigarette, because we were smoking the hurt away. We dismissed our concerns with a flick of fingers and a sentiment cribbed from ‘Cabaret’: divine decadence. The wave goodbye, over the shoulders, was even less than the efforts that the wisp of a silk scarf made. We were young then, careless with our hearts, and, so much worse, careless with the hearts of others. We did it to make it through the winter. If there was warmth to be found in that decadence – in the burn of a cocktail, in the embers of a cigarette, in the arms of a stranger – I don’t think I found it. The traces of it, the echoes of it, the hints and peeks and dusty remnants of it – they never added up to anything more than a want or a wish, and as much as I wanted them to come together in something of substance, they disappeared like the smoke from my mouth, all too quickly melting into whatever formed the black night air of that winter.
In the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, I would visit my friends at Cornell. Suzie was a fellow cynic when it came to love, perhaps even more acerbic at times than me. My broken heart’s club wasn’t assembled because the men fucked us over – it’s because the men never fucked us at all. Not the kind of fucking that was on my wish list. I wanted it all – and the men I knew then could only provide bits and pieces of it.
And so that winter was populated by the boozy, smoky nights where we found solace in approximating the divine decadence of someone like Sally Bowles – a creature as lost as we often felt, encased in her tattered fashion and solitary style. I listened to Marianne Faithfull, whose voice was the embodiment of smoke itself, and the desperation of winter.
It is understood that we are only just now seeing the light from stars that may have been extinguished or imploded (or whatever happens when a star dies) years after the fact. Is that comforting or disturbing? I can’t quite decide. It’s certainly a bit of a mind-fuck when it comes to time and perception and the purpose or pointlessness of our tiny place in the universe.
A similar sense of displacement and fuckery is at work when I find myself on the verge of sleep and wake, suspended in that dream-like bardo of worlds where what is real blends confusingly with what is past, what may have never come to pass, and what has yet to come to pass. Ghosts haunt that borderline realm – the ghosts of time: past, present and future – like some Ebenezer Scrooge parable.
Long ago, and oh, so far away I fell in love with you before the second show Your guitar, it sounds so sweet and clear But you’re not really here, it’s just the radio
Don’t you remember, you told me you loved me baby? You said you’d be coming back this way again, baby Baby, baby, baby, baby, oh baby I love you, I really do
This haunting cover of ‘Superstar’ by The Carpenters gives me similar pause, an echo of the original that I posted about earlier. The song somehow becomes even more evocative in this version, a hazy visage drained of color like dreams or memories, and if the first post was one of youthful clarity, this one feels fuzzy and messy and the result of all my time on earth.
Loneliness is such a sad affair And I can hardly wait to be with you again What to say, to make you come again? (Ooh, baby) Come back to me again (Ooh, baby) And play your sad guitar
For almost half a century, I’ve looked up at the same stars – the light from thousands of years ago. While my body aches and creaks and says so much time has passed, in relation to the stars this is merely a blip in the story of the universe. It lends all of us a certain humility, and humility will always be one of the most beautiful features of any human being. Too many of us (including myself too much of the time) forget to access or exhibit that at key moments – and every moment can be key when it comes to humility. At so many points, just a little dose of humility could have changed the course of history – personally and universally. When you think of how small we really are in the grand multi-dimensional scheme of time and space, it is gorgeously humbling.
Don’t you remember, you told me you loved me baby? You said you’d be coming back this way again, baby Baby, baby, baby, baby, oh baby I love you, I really do
My mother introduced us to the Carpenters, or maybe it was just her easy-listening radio station that did it. Whatever the case, the melodies of that musical group informed the early years of my musical education, and ever since I’ve been a sucker for a hook and melody delivered in earnest, dramatic fashion.
Leave it to Madonna to remind me of this song during a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the filming of ‘Evita’. She and some of the other actors were sitting around between takes and singing a few songs by the Carpenters. This was one of them, and whenever I hear it I’m instantly brought back to that winter of ‘Evita’ and all its now-acknowledged loneliness.
Loneliness is such a sad affair And I can hardly wait to be with you again What to say, to make you come again? (Ooh, baby) Come back to me again (Ooh, baby) And play your sad guitar
Once upon a long time ago, there was a boy who played his guitar for me ~ a nameless boy, on a drunken night, before I found true love. After a brief tussle in his flannel-sheeted bed, I laid there as he found his guitar in the darkened room and sat down on the edge of the mattress, strumming snippets of a few folk songs. I knew instantly we would never be together – his naked act was so raw and vulnerable even I would not approach damaging him in the way I had damaged others, and would damage more.
It wasn’t as selfless as it may seem – at the moment I understood I was saving myself as much pain as I was saving him. Still, I lingered when I should have been somewhere, anywhere else, and let him play his music for me. Barely illuminated by the gray light coming from a dirty window, he was mostly a silhouette, a tender shadow only given away through the movements of his arm and the strumming of the strings. He sang along a bit too – the voice of a young man when we were both still in the early stage of youth when we could be careless of heart and head and still maybe make it out unscathed. Maybe.
I dressed quickly when he paused in his songs. He tugged at my shirt a bit as I hastily worked to button it, and I left it mostly undone in my rush to get out of there. He never saw my eyes well up from the beauty of his act.
A piece of music has the power to paint its own pictures, just as much as a book or a play or a fable. Sometimes it can create more than a painting or a sculpture; those are set and stationary, whereas music is more malleable in its images. Such is the case with this magnificent work by Kayhan Kalhor – ‘Blue As The Turquoise Night of Neyshabur’ – here performed by Yo-Yo Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble. The stories that may be spun from hearing it run through the mind along myriad paths, each one slightly different, taking new turns and twists depending on the listener. It begins in a calm if slightly mysterious and tense tone, before gradually unfurling into a rollicking adventure.
Maybe it’s a love story, with all the tumult and passion of a first kiss. Maybe it’s a realization – a mystery slowly solved over the course of its fifteen minutes. Maybe it’s a journey, a trip we have taken to a new place, a new city, a new country. Maybe it’s a party, from the anticipatory preparation through the tense starting minutes to the bombastic climax when all the guests have assembled and the state of happy camaraderie crests in loud laughter and the majesty of merriment.
Listening to this on a dark January night when all that lay ahead were more dark January nights, I felt the gentle and insistent tug of art and beauty, the tantalizing wisp of imagination and inspiration, the call of some distant muse or siren. It was a tempting invitation to travel from the comforts of a conversation couch to any number of far-off lands and worlds. Why limit our experiences to what we can physically achieve when the body is so bound by time and place?
And so I listen to this piece of music, not looking up its genesis or background, not wanting to be influenced or nudged into something for the first few times I experience it. I want it to make its own way, choose its own adventure, conjure its own castles of creation. Make its own memory from a pile of mental rubble. My wrists ache, my knees are sore, my eyes are failing by the minute – the body begins the downward slope. The brain, such as it ever was, remains mostly intact – and the imagination, my one shining strength in a world of largely unimaginative comrades, is still sharply honed. It’s kept me going for all these 47 years, and it pushes me forward on this turquoise night, when I hear music that makes me feel like I can fly…
The sky clock ticked to an early descent of darkness. Late December worked like that. In the air hung the threat of snow and burial – a promise of peace and disappearance.
The first burn of love gets a bad rap. Like the first anything, it’s not always as bad as we make it out to be. At least, that’s what I told myself. If it was a lie, it was a lie of protection, of self-preservation. It was a lie to save a life. The burns that came after were more intense, more cutting, more dangerous. Far from making me stronger, that first burn merely revealed what the pain was like; subsequent injuries would not be lessened by any sort of numbing effect – they would mount and multiply and murder more than once. “That which does not kill you doesn’t necessarily make you stronger – it just nearly kills you,” or something like that. And in our weakened state, when the heart wants what it wants, we do foolish things. If we happen to be the object of desire, we often act just as foolishly – sometimes more-so, true power being afforded so rarely in life. And being so admired places one squarely in a position of power, whether admitted, acknowledged, or ignored. True power stems largely from love. But we’re not supposed to say such things. That would eliminate the sentiment of it. That would extract the magic. That would mean we’re all mostly hollow.
LOVE IS A BURNING THING
AND IT MAKES A FIERY RING
BOUND BY WILD DESIRE
I FELL INTO A RING OF FIRE
Victims of love get more play than victors. Their story… ok, our story, is usually more exciting – and certainly more interesting unless you’re one of the parties involved. When I think back to some of my earlier adventures in romance, particularly the unrequited kind (and of those there were many) my mind recoils in a mixture of horror, hilarity, and hubris. How one young man could be so hysterically stupid and at the same time so full of himself still boggles my mind – and somehow I knew exactly what I was doing, even as I knew I shouldn’t be doing it. Self-awareness doesn’t necessarily equate to self-understanding. Only in the understanding of motive and impetus does one find healing and the ability to truly let go and move on. I could not know that then, and so I burned…
I FELL INTO A BURNING RING OF FIRE
I WENT DOWN, DOWN, DOWN
AND THE FLAMES WENT HIGHER
AND IT BURNS, BURNS, BURNS
THE RING OF FIRE… THE RING OF FIRE
Burning demands more of a soundtrack than the typical crackling of a quaint fireplace. A true burn must roar, consuming all the oxygen in its path. It should be the sound of suffocation. Utter annihilation. Or in the case of this song, whereby the burn is mostly silent, the sound of something evil.
The music here begins in slow, deliberately diabolical fashion. Sinister elegance. Innocent love song taken to a level of denigration and denial. Aural defiance. From the wreckage comes the wrecker ~ wreaker of havoc and destroyer of innocence ~ and when survival becomes the offense, the surest way of saving the heart is to go on the attack. Reverse the hunt.
It’s music that begins insidiously – start it again and listen to the beginning. It doesn’t bash you over the head, it doesn’t instantly demand submission. I’ve tried that, and very rarely did it work; when it did, it never ensnared anyone worth ensnaring. No, this version of the song starts off slowly. It is an entrance of dramatic import – the kind of entrance that someone earns from a life of loving the hard way. It is the entrance of a poet and an arsonist ~ the entrance of someone who’s learned how to burn.
THE TASTE OF LOVE IS SWEET
WHEN HEARTS LIKE OURS MEET
I FELL FOR YOU LIKE A CHILD
OH, BUT THE FIRE WENT WILD
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by fire. I’d play with matches and magnifying glasses, burning spent pine needles and following their hisses and little explosions. Some say it’s an early sign of serial killers or psychotics. I’d watch the trails of smoke left by discarded cigarettes in the ashtray at the entrance to OTB, when Dad would bring my brother and me there when Mom was at night school. Entranced by the way the smoke curled and dissipated, we’d go home reeking of it on our clothes and hair.
Candles held an allure that was as frightening as it was beautiful – and I still remember the shiver of dread I felt when the electricity was out one night, and we were sitting in the family room in candlelight. My brother shifted the table so that one of the candles started to fall off. Not knowing a thing about fire, I jumped up and grabbed it, certain that had it hit the carpet the whole house would have gone up in a split second, devouring all of us before we could even attempt to flee. Such was my misunderstanding of how fire worked.
A similar misunderstanding occurred when I fell in love the first few times. I always thought it was going to be forever, and I always thought it was going to be easy and perfect. If it involved bending or changing or compromise of any kind, it wasn’t to be. I ended a couple of romances that way. More often than not, however, others ended them for me. And a few times, others wouldn’t even let the spark start a fire.
Blue fire runs across the ice before burrowing into its hole. An echo of the sky, which had long ago turned dark, its blue light bends and twists as if in peril or pain (and one usually leads to the other). Tricky things – fire and ice – each burning in its own way, each dangerous, each a warning unto itself. They invite you to get as close as possible, sometimes demanding it for your own survival, and then they threaten you with eradication.
On a cold morning at the end of December, I’m siding with the fire, and so I play this classic song by Johnny Cash. At first listen, some songs seem deceptively silly. Their instrumentation and production may feel dated, their delivery out of sync with the time. But the soul of a song – its spirit – won’t be lessened or diminished by the confines of its era. A song will live on as long as it means something to someone. This song suddenly meant something as I looked back on the many roads I took in search of love.
I FELL INTO A BURNING RING OF FIRE
I WENT DOWN, DOWN, DOWN
AND THE FLAMES WENT HIGHER
AND IT BURNS, BURNS, BURNS
THE RING OF FIRE… THE RING OF FIRE
Burning the place down was the theme for this fall on the website, and it’s going to smolder for a bit to bring us into the New Year. A pervading sense of nostalgia informed the last few months, and re-examining the many mistakes I made brought me back to the very first man who ever kissed me. In some ways that was a kiss of death. Certainly it was a kiss of pain – literally and figuratively. It burned like sandpaper against my young face, tracing its sting along my chest, and traveling downward to the burn I bucked against with all might and desire. A flaming September left fall in cinders.
Memories of lovers or would-be-lovers of the past mingled with newly-informed introspection and retrospection. While I don’t usually like to look back, it has afforded a certain wisdom over the past year or so – and I’m better able to see the longer arc of evolution that makes up one’s life. In the ensuing years after that first kiss, I would start my own fires, carrying a smoldering collection of embers to fling into the faces of would-be-suitors, not bothered by the blowback of deadly sparks that worked to blind and bind me.
My favorite pop star once asked, “Where do we go from here?” in a song fool-heartedly named ‘You Must Love Me’, lamenting that, “This isn’t where we intended to be.” Guessing the future, for all my planning and organization, has never been my thing, and I’ve always abhorred questions that demand some sort of knowledge of what may come, as if any of us could ever predict that, as if any of us could have a clue. We can hazard our own thoughts and cry our own tears, but no one really knows. “If you want to know how to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.”
I FELL INTO A BURNING RING OF FIRE
I WENT DOWN, DOWN, DOWN
AND THE FLAMES WENT HIGHER
AND IT BURNS, BURNS, BURNS
THE RING OF FIRE… THE RING OF FIRE
And love… exciting and new… come aboard… we’re expecting you…
Yes love…
Love has always proven the downfall and the rehabilitation. It is that ring of fire that burns brightly around us, blinding and thrilling and obscuring and revealing, until we can’t help but be transformed – for the better, for the worse, but always for something, never without consequence, never without reason. Bringing us high, high, higher and swinging us back down – the most obscene and insane amusement park ride one can imagine – spinning and whirling and rushing in gloriously-debilitating fashion. The heart races and the head tries to catch up. A parade of my beloved ones marches through my past, silent and accused, sheepishly pretending not to notice, or maybe not pretending at all. Perhaps such pretense was the only way they knew of letting someone down gently. Perhaps they truly are phantoms – ghost figures hollow of anything other than the patchwork of life I’ve given them in my head – floating in mostly empty fashion, made up of fragments and wishes and insubstantial wisps of what never even existed. We populate our pasts both with what we remember and what we make up.
The longest night of the year is now behind us, which only brings us to the second-longest night of the year, and so the long tunnel of winter stretches forward, elongating and disappearing into seemingly-endless darkness. In some ways we are at the bottom of the year – the ground level from which we can only rise and find light. To make it more bearable, we shift to the spirit of hygge here, something that will last beyond Christmas and New Year’s Eve, filling this corner of the internet with cozy warmth and sparkling comfort.
A bouquet of fresh greens to remind of a spring and summer to come.
A collection of candles lending soft light and gentle warmth to a chilly space.
A fuzzy blanket, wrapped around the shoulders and brought room to room.
A stark and sparse expanse of a whitewashed room, stunning in simplicity and grace, small and infinite at once.
Little earthly delights that hint at the sparkle of other worlds, where meaning might be found in the breathtaking font of companionship, in the shared experience of something that could be called heartwarming. This is how we navigate the winter – a winter that’s only just begun, a winter that holds most of its darkness in the days ahead, when the light of Christmas fades, and the freshness of a New Year all too quickly dissipates.
Christmas songs are an eclectic group. These days I go for those that bring a sense of calm imbued with some underlying joy. More ‘Coventry Carol’ than ‘Jingle Bells’, more ‘Christmas Waltz’ than ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’. The older I get, the more peace I want. Christmas chaos is for the children, and let them enjoy all the craziness. Give me the calm and the quiet and all the silent nights.
Or this mash-up of ‘Bring a Torch, Jeanette Isabella’ and ‘I Saw Three Ships’. Torches and boats – what could be more Christmassy than that?
Such music lends a crystalline clarity to the day at hand – and a Christmas morning that sparkles with snow and sunlight is a magical day indeed.
It’s a little after ten o’clock on the longest night of the year.
If I had any sense I wouldn’t be writing like this, not when the world is so moody, not when the darkness is so pervasive.
Yet here I sit, somewhat cozily ensconced in the attic amid a few trees lit with Christmas lights, and a universe securely planted on the wings of a fairy, to paraphrase Fitzgerald.
A piano song entitled ‘Winter Solstice’ provides the only sound to accompany my typing. Loneliness resounding, echoing more loneliness. Andy rests on the border of sleep and wake right below me, and I hear the muffled drone of the television as he deals with another migraine.
Drawn to the window, and the blackness of this never-ending night, I pull it open, then lift the screen as well. Leaning out into the night air, I breathe it in – something between smoky and chalky, something filled with the tiniest crystals of frozen water, something that comes out of me in a trail of water vapor barely lit by the distant lamp of a neighbor’s home across the street.
On this winter solstice, I seek a certain solace that I’d like to share, though I fear that’s not coming across, and I’m lost in fragmented sentences, and thoughts that don’t quite coalesce into meaning. This isn’t the part of the process I usually reveal. It’s easier to hide behind distractions than be honest about such things. And oh what distractions I have conjured over the years – the pomp and pizzazz, the flamboyance and frivolity, the masks and the imagined majesty – and oh how tired it all makes me feel tonight.
Perhaps, and quite hopefully, this is merely the passing whim of the first day of winter, wreaking its desolate emotional havoc, warning that the holidays are not to be had without extracting a certain payment – the cost of happiness.
Shutting the window, I curl into myself on the bed, dragging a thick blanket over my legs and surveying the room from this prone and somewhat defeated position. The day has had its way, even with its smallness, and I’m tired.
It is now 10:35. Time to stop this post. Time to shut down for the night.
Amid the mountains of madness and bleakness in this crumbling world, there are pockets of peace and serenity, and people who still care to share beauty and love and art. It is here where I find moments of peace and solidarity. One of these wondrous figures is Patrick Dexter, whom I stumbled upon sorting through the wreckage that remains of Twitter, and a video of him playing this ancient Irish carol brought me to his music. Playing before a backdrop of Irish beauty, often in some cozy handmade sweater, Dexter offers a place of refuge – so necessary and appreciated in this tumultuous times. Today he is crowned as Dazzler of the Day, because bringing people a little bit of peace will always be a dazzling feat. Check out his YouTube channel here and share in the joy.
“You’re forgiven… Everything you don’t know I forgive you for. Now let mama get her makeup done.” ~ Madonna, ‘Truth or Dare’
Almost every dilemma in my life can be solved by some reference in Madonna’s ‘Truth or Dare’ documentary, and having memorized every line of dialogue in it, I bring these little snippets of questionable wisdom with me even when the rest of the world has no idea what I’m talking about. Often it’s better that way. And for all those issues that somehow escape the wisdom of ‘Truth or Dare’, there’s always a pop song to give guidance and solace.
The more I know, the less I understand, All the things I thought I knew, I’m learning again I’ve been tryin’ to get down To the heart of the matter But my will gets weak And my thoughts seem to scatter But I think it’s about forgiveness Forgiveness
In my youth, I’d look to the simplicity of a Madonna lyric to solve the riddles of life, thinking that if it was good enough for Madonna – who seemed to be making such a fabulous life for herself – it could be good enough for me. Oddly enough, much of the time those words sustained me, or at the very least kept me alive when the typical teenage angst threatened to extinguish my mere existence. That was a time of relative innocence, and such innocence has long been destroyed.
These times are so uncertain There’s a yearning undefined People filled with rage We all need a little tenderness How can love survive in such a graceless age? And the trust and self-assurance that lead to happiness They’re the very things we kill, I guess Pride and competition cannot fill these empty arms And the wall they put between us, you know it doesn’t keep me warm
Back then, it felt like a song could save a life, even if I now see that that’s not entirely true, even if a song can only help you to save yourself, because no one else is going to do it. A harsh truth bomb, more cutting or diabolical than any dare, it helped me to understand, even at such a young age, that there was no true safety for some of us, that when we really needed help or found ourselves in dire emotional straits, it would be better not to have to rely on anyone else. That was survival, especially for a gay kid. It used to bother me that it had to be so; lately I’ve come to appreciate it, even if I’ve only gone so far as to unsheath the sword. Soft walk, big stick, you know the rest.
There are people in your life who’ve come and gone They let you down You know they’ve hurt your pride You better put it all behind you baby ’cause life goes on You keep carryin’ that anger It’ll eat you up inside baby
I’ve been trying to get down to the heart of the matter But my will gets weak And my thoughts seem to scatter But I think it’s about forgiveness Forgiveness Even if, even if you don’t love me
This isn’t to blame anyone for not being there. It’s just a little stream of consciousness, and streams can be messy and meandering, winding their way in convoluted form, eating away at banks we thought would stand like bulwarks for our lifetime. No, there is no blame here, aside from the heaps I am placing on myself, and maybe that’s why there is the need for forgiveness. This fall has been filled with a strange sense of nostalgia, of looking back at my past and making better sense of it now that my thoughts feel clearer. It’s mostly been a good thing, and I’ve mostly done it alone, because I was the only one who was there. Besides, when it comes to the real shit, not the silly histrionic squawking in which I usually engage, but the real hardcore trouble that fucks people up, I’ve found the following passage from Alexandre Dumas to be most helpful: “I’ll bury my grief deep inside me and I’ll make it so secret and obscure that you won’t even have to take the trouble to sympathize with me.”
Revenge and redemption was at the heart of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’, where that quote originated, but that’s not what I’m after either. The most hollow words a person can utter are “I told you so.” More often than not, being right is simply being lonely.
For all my self-imposed alone time, I rarely felt like I was lonely, but I’ve been rethinking that too. Looking back at that scared little boy, and the man he grew to become, I’m thinking about forgiveness… forgiveness…
I’ve been tryin’ to get down To the heart of the matter Because the flesh will get weak And the ashes will scatter So, I’m thinkin’ about forgiveness Forgiveness Even if, even if you don’t love me anymore
In order to save Frosty, his friend and creator Karen boards a train to deliver him to the North Pole, where he won’t be in danger of melting. As they near their destination, and the world turns all wintry and white with snow, they find themselves outside, where Karen is chilled and in need of warmth. As happens in magical situations, there just so happens to be a greenhouse in the middle of this snowy night, and they duck into it to spend the night and warm Karen up.
Frosty: ‘Cause when the thermometer gets all reddish, the temperature goes up. And when the temperature goes up, I start to melt! And when I start to melt, I get all wishy-washy.
When Karen wakes from her nap, all she finds is Frosty’s magical top hat and a big puddle where Frosty used to be. My heart always broke at that scene, no matter how many times I’d seen it. I wondered if it was as traumatic for anyone else.
As much as the scene tramautzed me, it also intrigued and enchanted. A greenhouse in the midst of a snowy night felt magical, like one of those gorgeously contrasted sensations when one cuddles into a nest of blankets in the midst of a chilly room – the feeing of being warm and cozy while in close proximity to a cold and wintry world.
I also love a greenhouse in the middle of a frightful winter – it is good for the soul. I make weekly pilgrimages to the local nursery during the winter just to save my sanity. Breathing in warm and humid air and smelling the earthly delights is a balm for my mental well-being – at any time of the year, but particularly so in the winter.
Santa Claus: Don’t cry, Karen, Frosty’s not gone for good. You see, he was made out of Christmas snow and Christmas snow can never disappear completely. It sometimes goes away for almost a year at a time and takes the form of spring and summer rain. But you can bet your boots that when a good, jolly December wind kisses it, it will turn into Christmas snow all over again. Karen: Yes, but… He was my friend. Santa Claus: Just watch.
As for Frosty, the happy ending always rang a little hollow, but every year I would watch it all over again, hoping for some other outcome, hoping he would escape into the world of winter when he had a chance, save himself before he needed to be saved, and live happily ever after. We all want the Christmas miracle.
