In the quiet skies of Christmas Eve

Carry me home, oh easterly wonder, oh Christmas lantern.
Carry my dreams into the rising sun.
Bring us salvation, oh Christmas lantern,
show us the path along which tomorrow will come.

This is a thing I will bring forward from 2011.

We’d just returned from a nice family get together in Racine on Christmas Eve night, and as I was throwing out some trash I saw a gitka.

Gaia and Jenifer and I were disembarking from the Scion. I was standing in the alley behind our house in Milwaukee, dropping some trash in the cans back there. In the sky, to the west I see a familiar orange and yellow spark of flame.

“What the hell is that?” I ask to myself, more any anyone. I can’t get my eyes to focus on the colored blob, the infinite space between the Christmas Eve stars playing havoc with my depth perception.

My mind flashes to the sky lantern festivals I’ve read about and seen depicted in film. This must be some loan-wolf paper lantern. It is beautiful and wrong. One does not often see a great flame rising in the west. Almost never. It is a blessing and a surprise.

Jeni and Gaia come out and see it too. The lantern, flickering and bobbing either 20 feet or 200 feet off the ground, on an easterly flow, floated away as quickly as it appeared– giving us each a few moments under it to make a wish and send it traveling along its side.

It headed swiftly off to Lake Michigan, and straight on until morning.