The new year has brought a return of the cold weather, but no more snow. Warm and cosy in my studio I am working away, my head filled with memories of those magical days before Christmas, when the little church outside the house was transformed into a fairytale scene, and I played outside with my family and forgot about work. Sledges and snowballs and snowmen dance in my mind while I listen to Tchaikovsky’s Winter Day Dreams (his first symphony).
On December 21st – the solstice – I joined my colleages at Rhapsode for a day of music, art and magic. Using the story of an ex-student, Quitterie de Castelbajac, forty children joined myself and Rebecca Leek and Vanessa Stone to create a shadow play. It seemed appropriate for the darkest day of the year.
Quitterie’s story – which won this year’s Rhapsode Writer’s Award, is Mr Winter’s Vanishing, an exquisite story of how Mr Winter one year refuses to appear. He believes he is so disliked that he stays at home in his little frozen house.
Mr Autumn is trapped and Father Christmas has no winter wind for his sledge. It takes the wish of a boy and little swallow to resolve things.
Outside the snow fell as we transformed the beautiful Howgills (the Friend’s Meeting house in the old Quaker town of Letchworth Garden City) into a miniature theatre for the day. The little orchestra played as the shadows danced and hundreds of paper-cut snowflakes temporarily stole the limelite from the real thing.
This is the first White Christmas I’ve ever had. And it is firmly preserved in my own Winter Day dreams…
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