A Journey Into Christmas Past

As Christmas looms just a week away, my mind drifts to a tradition that our family has grown to adore over the years - nighttime sleighrides at Nestlenook Farm in Jackson, NH.

If you are picturing yourself simply piling into a rickety sleigh and riding around in a circle a few times, you are sorely mistaken. A sleigh ride at Nestlenook Farm is pure perfection - and can take even the most cynical and jaded soul back into a world filled with childhood dreams.

To get into one of these sleighs is akin to taking a magical ride through the world of Christmases past - the kind of Christmases that you always dreamed of, filled with twinkling lights in the deep woods, skaters twirling happily under a beautiful white bridge, and tiny fallow deer that appear from behind the trees - creatures that are too adorable for even a six-year-old child's mind to dream up.

Huddled around multiple outdoor bonfires are adults, excited as children, warming themselves, and honeymooners kissing romantically in the firelight or under one of the impossibly huge trees, every branch aglow with twinkling lights. Children run back and forth to get more hot chocolate, throwing snowballs and shrieking with excitement.

The first time I saw one of the sleighs, I was awestruck by the sheer size of the horses, who snorted and paced, the heat from their well-worked bodies rising in a steam in the winter night. They were powerful creatures - yet they gently bowed their heads to let a three-year-old girl pat their immense noses with a tiny pink mitten.

My parents, brother, niece and nephews smiled in anticipation as they piled into the sleigh, pulling heavy woolen blankets over their legs for warmth. The air was thick with the scent of horse sweat, leather, and wool, as well as smoke from the woodfires burning nearby. As the sleigh first pulled away with a lurch, my niece's sky-blue eyes widened, in an expression of childlike excitement and, perhaps, a bit of fear.

Deep in the woods, the quiet sound of the horse hoofs and sleigh bells seemed to make everyone stop their conversations and just listen. The twinkling lights on the evergreens cast beautiful shadows all around, making even the homeliest faces glow with beauty. And I swore that behind a few trees, I could see a tiny elf or two, peeking at us.

So many dreams I dreamed over the years, looking out at those magical woods. So many tears I quietly shed in the refuge of those shadows, when it seemed that Mother Earth herself was listening. And so many peals of laughter still echoed among the beautiful evergreens.

The sleigh suddenly stopped and the passengers perked up and looked around. Tiny deer walked out shyly toward the sleigh, waiting to be fed tiny pellets of food. I jumped out to feed them, as always, along with all the other little kids. As always, their beautiful faces never ceased to amaze me. And, as always, my mother had to call me back to the sleigh when it was time to leave. I guess some things will never change.

Skaters twirled on a pond illuminated with white lights and raced under an arched bridge into a Christmas card scene. As the sleigh paused on the bridge, I felt that I had truly gone back into time, a hundred years or more.

As I think back on it now, my eyes well a bit with tears, for all those who will never come back to spend Christmas with us - for the passage of time always brings change. People move away, relationships end, and small children grow up. But such are the most precious moments that linger in your mind and heart - and some of mine will always echo with the sound of horse hoofs and tiny sleigh bells.

May you all have a blessed Christmas, wherever you are.

Winter's Tapes

As the first snow of the season buffets down, I take a drive along my favorite town road between Brunswick and Cook's Corner, watching everything spring, summer and fall become cloaked in a grey stillness. There is a peace in this, a perfection of design, as if all the stresses, mistakes and sorrows of the past are now covered in a sparkling, new purity. Nature seems to be repainting my life's canvas, gifting me with a Christmas present of one giant do-over.

I rustle through my glove compartment, looking for the tiny tapes, the little treasures I made almost ten years ago on a solo cross-country trip to the coast of Oregon and Washington.

Ten years ago.

Those words hit my stomach like a sucker punch.

What did I do in those ten years? I struggle to think. There was love, to be sure, along with plenty of heartbreak. There was prosperity and good times, and there were lean times filled with loneliness and poverty. There were times of uncertainty and times of beautiful blossoming. Times of creative intensity. Times filled with mysteries that still, to this day, completely boggle my mind.

The tapes noisily play on, filled with tales of birds dancing slow circles in the sky, of lonely truck stops out in the middle of the country, the only place to get something hot to eat, for miles and miles around. Standing inside of the skeleton of a dead tree that was stories tall and as big around as a small cabin. Coastlines that plummeted to the sea, filled with bright yellow flowers.

I could go on and on about the experiences I had, and may do so in another entry. But one thing about the trip is staying with me today.

The passage of time.

How similar my ten-year-younger voice sounds on the tape, and yet, how different. I was the same self back then - but it was like being in a very different play. My goals were different. My living situation was different. My lifestyle was different. And every player, with a few exceptions, has now been replaced by someone else. And I realize, upon listening, that this crazy trip that I had taken years ago had marked a new beginning. I did not know what compelled me to go - but only that I must go. And in those crazy thirty days, I learned more about Life and myself than I had ever dreamed possible.

When I returned home from my journey, I thought things would just go back to the way they had been before.

But I was wrong.

The mysteries, the spiritual experiences, the great, vast spaces of the West were somehow now in my heart, and a part of me forever. It was like trying to fit a galaxy into a tiny box, and as much as I tried, pushed, pulled and shoved - there was just no going back.

And I remember thinking something that every experienced wanderer knows.

Sometimes you just can't go home again.