When my grandfather was alive, I would drive over to his house on the morning after Thanksgiving to set up a Christmas Village on his weatherproofed front porch. He had built the original village with his father, who I never met. They constructed the buildings from cherry wood that grew on the seminary grounds down the street from his childhood home. There was a blacksmith’s shop, two farmhouses, a manger, and a church. Over the years, he added to the display a number of miniature figurines like farm animals and pine trees, cross-country skiers and carriages. More recently, the scene had begun to incorporate city life. The farmland gave way to a small town with a bustling main street where tiny, cast-iron figurines walked in-and-out of shops, and in the square volunteers on ladders decorated a Christmas tree that towered above the small ceramic stores. Then came the city with its automobiles and busy sidewalks. Street vendors sold roasted chestnuts from pushcarts, ice-skaters twirled upon a motorized pond, and the humble church had transformed into a grand cathedral with stained glass windows.
One year the Sun had gleamed through the porch window just right so that a glare exploded over the manger where the magi and camels had come to adore the figure wrapped in swaddling clothes. Grandpa had said it was the Holy Ghost. After we laid train tracks around the perimeter and set the Lionel locomotive in motion over fields of cotton snow tacked to the wooden platform, we sat down to a lunch made from leftovers and beheld our work. That was the year grandma brought out bags of chestnuts she had roasted in the oven. The start of a new tradition, she had said. My grandpa died on Christmas day before the Sun had a chance to come up. It was a Friday and the village slept, unaware that their god of creation would not be there to turn on the lights in the morning.
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Matthew Schultz teaches creative writing at Vassar College. He is the author of two novels: On Coventry and We, The Wanted. Matt has a chapbook of paradelles forthcoming from Beir Bua Press in January 2022, and his collection of prose poems, Icaros, is forthcoming from ELJ Editions in May 2022.