Guest
List of Sounds: - the gentle yet celebratory crackle of a midwinter fire, lit here as in every other room, since no hearth must be dark on the day when returning light marks the miracle of an infinitely, perpetually hallowed ordinary - the quiet tick-tock of a mantle clock, which does not “keep time“ today (who can pay heed, on Christmas, to the harrying ticking-by of minutes?) but instead voices its greeting to all those who enter, ensuring that no visitor is without cheerful yet unassuming company, and reveling in each hour of the year's very best day with a dulcet chiming of bells - an occasional bluster of wind, whose nip does not chill the joy of the day but is, instead, enlivening -- swirling snowflakes into dance, and kissing cheeks into rosy flush, and sweetening the delight of arrival by allowing it to be felt not just in the heart but real and manifest in the warm tingle of fingers and toes - the shifting of chattering voices from distant & muffled to congenially near:
