As always too many nice posts and photo's making up this thread to comment well. All really appreciated. Wishing all who are unwell or carrying too much sky, better things to come.
@RainbowZebraWarrior Not stupid, a penalty of being kind enough to run the thread for everyone. I shall shamefacedly admit that I spent a day wondering if you were ok and slightly concerned for you before trying to post, wondering if there was an etiquette to everyone else's apparent silence, and even then it didn't occur to me why the thread wasn't accepting new messages until I read it here!
@AgathaMystery Sympathies, I have some difficulty trying to put childhood miseries behind me, but am determined to thoroughly compensate myself by enjoying what I can, while I can.
Christmas was mainly difficult, painful and not for us, and my memories often don't chime well with others so often find it a bit difficult to find common ground, but I was a very Christmas sensory seeking child, (still am!) so what I could see, smell, taste, hear, etc actually became all the more precious to me, and when I remember those things I'm taken back to accentuated senses and a child's world and scale. Some are slightly melancholy in some ways, but you can't truly appreciate light without having known darkness, and vice versa.
So in the spirit of that: as an unkempt seven year old I used to kneel on a dark flagstone entrance of a Catholic run place to watch their candle backlit wax nativity scene on a table at the entrance. It wasn't big (about the size of a fist) and if no one about, I'd shuffle forward on my knees to get my chin on the table a foot away.
The smell was odd, possibly a tallow based wax with hindsight, and one night, my hair.
I'd become immersed in an amazing flickering blue and white carved wax backlit scene, and cold and sore knees would vanish as I marveled at the star (engraved thinner wax) glowing brightly and luminescent in a graduated deep royal blue sky, behind the people and animals peering into the crib. It changed each night as the backlighting candle got lower and lower.
The original backlighting candle ran out, and it appeared one night with a replacement that slowly burnt a hole through the back of it, starting with the star. The end of the world, in many ways, but I wasn't missed by the suspicious nuns.
I went looking and discovered this was almost certainly a Gurley candle or similar, and wondered if they might be part of anyone else's memories?
'My one' was a fuller horseshoe, with a bigger expanse of sky, and more, smaller figures and is a whole world of subtle flickering beauty in the gloom, in my mind...