Christmas 2025

‘In the bleak mid-winter’

Victorian Valley Chapel, Orcas Island

I Want You To Know

I want you to know

The moments fall like snow

Around us

Piling up in hills

We play on

The wind blows

The snow blows away

Glistening in the sun

Then gone

A million moments gone

And new ones born

Are you not amazed?

-Susan Osborn

A Christmas Story 12/25

A child is born in danger. Laid on a woolen coat in a basement bomb shelter. Refugees huddle in the corners. Weary soldiers stomp in and wonder at what they find. They lay their guns aside like shepherds’ crooks and quietly kneel to get a closer look. Three velvet robed kings rush in slightly tipsy, driven from a festival pageant interrupted by shelling. They bring cakes and dates and wine they grabbed from the feast table. Above, the sky is lit up by explosions. Dust shakes down from the rafters. The father holds a cloth over the baby’s face. The terrified mother lifts the cloth to look into her baby’s eyes. He sneezes and they all laugh. *

-dD

In The Bleak Mid-Winter One of Susan’s (and my) favorite carols. By Christina Rossetti wife of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

“In the Bleak Mid-winter” from ‘All Through the Night’, Brian Becvar - keyboards

Note bene: December 20 is the birthday of both Brian Becvar and Ralf Illenberger two of Susan’s great friends and accompanists.

This one isn’t a Christmas Carol but I thought it might be helpful these days:

“Letter from Paul” from ‘Still Life’ Paul Halley - piano & keybords, Nancy Rumbel - english horn

This one should be a Christmas Carol:

“A Child is Born” by Thad Jones (or maybe Roland Hanna), Paul Halley -piano and Susan Osborn, live unreleased.

You can find more of Susan’s Christmas music and the rest free Here:

Wishing you the very best Christmas you can make for yourself. Whatever that looks like.

This is not Luci Shaw but I think she’d like the image.

• In Memoriam: Poet Luci Shaw died this month.

Her friend Dick Staub writes: One of my last conversations with Luci was about the exquisite serendipity of Susan‘s first entrance to KINDLINGS fest being Luci’s lecture on ‘Friends for the Journey’ that she cowrote with Madeleine L’Engle, Susan‘s friend from St. John the Divine.

Here’s a poem from Luci:

Lament for a Poet Just Dead

When at last she died, all they could moan in grief was Mother, mother. As though that was all she was to them, as though all she’d accomplished her whole life was maternity, as though all her conceptions had been

physical. Small memory of the lines of glistening words like laundry hung to dry in the sun. Or the envelopes of poems in mailboxes bursting like spores into print. The weather balloons of

images rising, flying, their colored silk collapsing on foreign beaches. Tell them: Try to remember the gale of her passion like wind grating itself against the corner of the beach house,

its wreath of fog streaming now, inescapable. Tell them: Compass yourselves with its salty breath and the whisper of foam and wrack and detritus that still rises from the shore of her life.

Luci Shaw - from “Waterlines”

So, “Compass yourselves with its salty breath and the whisper of foam and wrack and detritus that still rises from the shore of her life.”

See you next year. Keep a loose upper register.

* To hear a simple, honest, human expression.