“The bells rang back through the trees”
On L.M. Montgomery’s 150th birthday, when I was reading passages at random from her novels and journals, I came across Emily Starr’s letter to her father about Christmas at New Moon and the moment at which she “didn’t feel like a stranger among the Murrays any more” (Emily of New Moon, Chapter 20). It’s an amusing letter—for example, she says her Aunt Elizabeth “looked quite handsome and I was proud of her. You like your relations to look well even if you don’t like them.” And the ending is beautiful.
Emily begins by saying that “Christmas is over. It was pretty nice. I never saw so many good things cooked all at once.” After all the celebrations have ended, Uncle Wallace asks everyone to “‘think for a few moments of those who have gone before.’”
Emily says, “I liked the way he said it—very solemnly and kind. It was one of the times when I am glad the blood of the Murrays flows in my vains. And I thought of you, darling Father, and Mother and poor little Mike and Great-great-Grandmother Murray, and of my old account book that Aunt Elizabeth burned, because it seemed just like a person to me. And then we all joined hands and sung ‘For Auld Lang Syne’ before they went home.” This is the moment at which—despite her sorrows, and her anger at Aunt Elizabeth—Emily no longer feels like a stranger in her new home.
At the end, she writes that when the visiting relatives left the house, “Aunt Laura and I stood out on the porch to watch them go. Aunt Laura put her arm around me and said, ‘Your mother and I used to stand like this long ago, Emily, to watch the Christmas guests go away.’ The snow creaked and the bells rang back through the trees and the frost on the pighouse roof sparkled in the moonlight. And it was all so lovely (the bells and the frost and the big shining white night) that the flash came and that was best of all.”
Merry Christmas to those of you who will be celebrating this week. I hope you’ll hear (or imagine) bells ringing or snow creaking or catch a glimpse of frost sparkling in the moonlight. Most of all, whether you’re celebrating Christmas or not and whether you’re in a snowy, frosty part of the world or not, I hope you’ll experience some of the peace that Emily describes here.
I’ll add a few photos my friend Kate Scarth took at Christmas at Green Gables in Cavendish, PEI, on L.M. Montgomery’s 150th birthday. Many thanks to Kate for sending these lovely pictures and for giving permission to share them with you here.
And I’ll end this post with a photo of the wreath I made at a workshop in Lunenburg recently, hosted by Svenja Dee of Tulipwood, along with photos of the holiday lights in the Halifax Public Gardens.
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Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:
“She placed her bonnet on his head & ran away” (my essay from the 2024 JASNA AGM, published in Persuasions On-Line)
Happy 249th Birthday to Jane Austen!
Read more about my books, including St. Paul’s in the Grand Parade, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, and Jane Austen and the North Atlantic, here.
Copyright Sarah Emsley 2024; PEI photos copyright Kate Scarth 2024 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.
