Celebration!

The heat of the bonfire was on our faces, all of us gathering just above the beach, and counting down seconds til midnight. The kids were dragging more driftwood up, to throw onto the flames and make showers of sparks, until they were stopped so the fire wouldn’t be so huge it would need someone to stay up all night watching it. Little pads of paper and pens circulated, so people could write something they wanted to burn up in the fire at the turning of the year, and just at midnight someone set off an (illegal) firework down on the beach that shot colored sparks up into the cold dark sky, and we were all so glad to be there together.

Up at the house, the wonderful warm house, every surface laden with potluck abundance to make your head spin: wine, cake, cheeses, pie, fish, lasagne, candy, champagne, fresh-pressed apple juice, home-made breads, soups, nuts, liqueurs… even pomegranate seeds. Twinkling lights and shadowed corners, the house so warm from the woodstove that people migrated out to the porch to cool off and tell jokes and fill glasses (the various bottles mostly outdoors to stay cold).

Kids running out into the night, playing on the tire swing in the bonfire light, going down onto the dark beach where full moon through clouds was the only light. Teenagers gathering in fine dark places, the bonfire or anywhere else private, plenty of shadows to find. Some of us in masks and flowers and finery, most in ordinary sweaters and jeans. Toddler asleep under the Christmas tree that was actually a sculpture of driftwood and moss and lights.

The quality of closeness — how to even explain? Most of us there bound to others by blood or custom or proximity over decades. Children you still remember as preschoolers, now there with their own babies, the web of individual linking threads of history. How many parties even happen now where grade school children, teenagers, people of every generation all the way up to those in their 70’s and 80’s, all throw themselves equally into the celebration?

And the children move through firelight and mystery. There are no separate “children’s activities”, no (god forbid) videos set up to keep them segregated, no amusements arranged beyond the dark, the fire, the beach, the whole true glorious occasion. And we clapped for the retiring post-mistress, who was there with flowers on, all of us marking the passing of time and knowing with one glance at each other whole worlds which we’d seen together and it’s New Year’s now and hurray!