It’s 05:30 am on Thursday the 22nd of December 2011 and at this moment we’re the farthest we get from our sun. This is the very zenith of the proverbial Bleak Midwinter. That’s why it’s so bloody dark and cold.
Aeons ago our ancestors built – with their bare hands – cryptic monuments such as the Goseck circle and Sí an Bhrú, some of whose passages or stones seem ingeniously aligned with the sun as it rises on this morning.
Today we cover chocolate Swiss Rolls in butter-cream icing to make them look a bit like logs in their honour.
As the time for giving and receiving and flicking through the channels, hoping you don’t have to watch the same Christmas Only Fools and Horses again draws near, what better way to get in the festive mood than with a seasonal poem? All the very best to you and yours dear reader, now read on.
Yule Horror
by H. P. Lovecraft
There is snow on the ground,
And the valleys are cold,
And a midnight profound
Blackly squats o’er the wold;
But a light on the hilltops half-seen hints of feastings un- hallowed and old.
There is death in the clouds,
There is fear in the night,
For the dead in their shrouds
Hail the sin’s turning flight.
And chant wild in the woods as they dance round a Yule- altar fungous and white.
To no gale of Earth’s kind
Sways the forest of oak,
Where the sick boughs entwined
By mad mistletoes choke,
For these pow’rs are the pow’rs of the dark, from the graves of the lost Druid-folk.