"If I were asked what was most memorable about this Christmas, I should have to say an experience unknown to most people in a temperate climate: the experience of absolute silence . . .
. . . I was, I am, sitting in a room in a typical white-painted wooden old colonial New England house on a little hilltop in northern Vermont, looking out of high Georgian windows through narrowed eyelids – simply because what I see through the windows is blinding whiteness. A world, a planet of snow rolling away as a white valley, up into the wooded foothills, all the trees having branches like dropping swords of snow, and on beyond up the distant white mountains to, as Johnny Mercer said, a blue umbrella sky."
Now that's Christmas.
