Cozy Winter Scene
I’m all ready for bed. My parents and I are sitting in the living room. Or should I say I am lying on the living room carpet and my parents are sitting on the couch. My father is reading the evening newspaper, the Montreal Star. It’s getting close to Christmas — you can feel it in the air. My mother is doing her crossword. It’s quiet in the house; my older siblings are all out this particular evening. Just the three of us are at home on this winter’s night.
I start singing Silent Night and my parents listen politely. I am not the best singer in the house but I have heart. As I am singing my father gets up and goes into the kitchen to get himself and my mother a drink.
“Guess what?” my father says to me as he walks back into the living room. “What?” “It’s snowing outside,” he replies while handing my mother her drink. She is concentrating on her crossword. “What is another word for…?” She starts to ask and then she looks over at my father and me who are now staring intently out the front window watching the snowfall. “What are you two looking at?” she asks us. “We’re watching the snow fall, Mom,” I say. My Dad and I continue looking out the window. My mother then drops the crossword onto the coffee table and joins us at the window. “Oh, it sure is coming down isn’t it? It’s going to be a white Christmas this year!” she exclaims.
When it snowed in Montreal when I was a child, it really snowed. It snowed a lot! My parents, who were originally from Toronto, were always shocked at the amount of snow in Montreal compared to Toronto.
“It sure is beautiful isn’t it?” my father says to my Mom.
The furnace is blasting warm air up through the vents in the living room, and the lights in the house cast a warm glow across the room.
I remember only feeling this incredible peacefulness that night oh so many years ago when I was a very young girl. Our home was always so busy and bustling with phones ringing and people dropping by. It always seemed so very loud. But this night there was a calm over the three of us that I don’t ever remember experiencing again. The feeling that night has stayed with me all of these years. Such a perfect night it was, just a few days before Christmas. My parents no doubt were taking some time to relax before the rush of Christmas dinner parties were upon them. The hustle and bustle of the season seemed to cease to exist that night. There was a hush — a kind of tranquility — over the house as I sang Silent Night for my parents.
I never stayed up that late when I was young; my parents were strong believers in sleep for the young and the young at heart. Sleep was very important to them and so that evening I did not stay up too long. But I stayed up long enough to enjoy being in this happy place with my Mom and Dad. A place where there were no expectations on them or on me. Each of us doing our own thing, my Mom with her crossword, Dad reading the paper, and me just being a little girl intent on singing every last verse of Silent Night.
Image Credit
“Neighbor’s house on a snowy night,” by Rochelle Hartman. Creative Commons Flickr. Some rights reserved.
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