Poem for Christmas by Alexander McCall Smith

At Christmas time, and always I would like to wish all the readers of the books a very joyful Christmas and a good New Year. Thank you for all your support over the year, and may the next few days be a time of peace for you.

I have written a poem for this Christmas. Here it is. The title is "At Christmas time, and always":

How we remember the past

Depends on how we experience the present:

The great insight of Marcel Proust

In his long-winded but entirely delightful

Novel was that the present

Mediates the past, unlocks its secrets;

So that which we taste or smell

Today determines what we think

We saw or felt in the past;

Proust’s memories came to him

When he took the madeleine cake

With tea; how strange that a shell-shaped

Cake, tasting of lemon, should taste too

Of a whole world of country houses

And walks and eccentric relations,

And the entire rich landscape of France.

All of us, I think, have some olfactory trigger

That will take us back to a time

When our present seemed somehow simpler,

When the countours of an unhappy world

Seemed so less uncertain, when life

Seemed a predictable and more manageable matter

Of navigation between now and a future

We felt entitled to; when the thought

Of growing up, falling in love,

And finding something to do

Were not impossible challenges,

But were things we could not wait to embrace.

For me, the smell of oranges and marzipan,

And subtle whiffs of candle smoke

Mean Christmas; just as surely

As that smell that precedes a storm in Africa,

That curious smell of rain, presages a downpour,

And all the rolling thunder of those great

Cumulo-nimbus clouds, those purple banks

Of air-borne moisture eager to fall.

Childhood memories are still there,

Come to the fore when one closes one’s eyes,

And allows tastes and smells

To compose the courtyard of our recognition;

These memories may be of happiness

And love that is yet to be rebuffed,

Not believing that anybody could turn us down,

Could not think of us as we think of ourselves.

My dear, at Christmas, you shyly ask

What my wish might be; all you can take

Away with you at the end, as the old adage has it,

Is that which you’ve given away, nothing more.

So I ask, instead, for you;

That you may find flowers where you thought

No flowers were; that you may not want

For the things you wished you had;

That your heart may be full, that you

May feel there’s nothing more

You could reasonably wish to do;

That you may hear the music you

Prefer to hear, that you may spend time

With the friends you want about you;

That you may never hear the same thing

Twice if you would have preferred

Not to hear it the first time round;

That people may listen to what you say

And laugh in all the right places;

That you may be happy and close your eyes

Indifferent to any terrors of the night;

That, and more, I wish for you

At Christmas time, and always.

AMcS