On top of this cataclysm, doesn't Uncle Timothy, right on the precipice of hibernation, rouse himself up, rise from his warm beechwood seat, put on the only good pair of pants left him by the braiding Aunt Lydia, shake off forty years of indifference to the heart, go over the hills and two-foot drifts two farms away, propose to the Widow Toothaker, marry her after three nights' wakefulness, and leave his brother's house for good, and start in on married life at his age, in the fifties, on a ten acre farm mostly ledges and juniper! But the farm happens to have an even better harbor than Brother William's and a wide front door to the inexhaustible larder of the ocean. And Timothy is, for all his bulk, a smart man with a clam hoe and a lobster trap.
The day before Christmas, a holiday he has never missed since he wore is first brief trousers, this coast man, whom no one could pry away from the sea with a cant dog, takes off with his new bride for a honeymoon at unsalty and wintry Niagara Falls! Which all goes to prove that you can't tell from the looks of a tomcat, as Father declares, how far he can jump.
Christmas comes in with its mince pics and roasted goose, and with a lot of salt mackerel and pungent red herring as side dishes.
The dish of the month is the Christmas Day gander fattened on the family turnips that got their sharp flavor and stout texture from the mussel mud of the sea. But the dish of this month is also the last tenderloin from Peter's first deer roasted on the ancient spit over the open fire on the sitting room hearth. It is also mince pies which have the taste of the sea their apples were ferried home on grained into their flavor and the taste of the deer the family brought down. The dish of the month is likewise the family's fattest hams smoked over popple wood by Peter. It is the family lobsters Mother put up in jars last September, when lobsters were their tenderest and juiciest, steaming now in a stew that recalls summer. It is the blackberries that Peter kept the berry aunt from bagging compressed now into thick jam. The dish of the month is legion, and most of it has the flavor and sparkle and salt life of the sea in it. So, though the sea turns into a solid continent of white two miles out from the shore on the night before Christmas, when the thermometer falls suddenly twenty-two below zero, and though the “Mary Louise” joins the mainland at her moorings, the sea is still here at the family table.
The aunt of this month is legion, too. For most of the monthly aunts return, with proper and even improper uncles in tow, and the good Lord only knows how many he and she cousins of all calibers, to put their imprints on the boys and girls of the farm's family and shake the family up into bubbles of excitement. The uncles and aunts and cousins come to help celebrate Christmas Day and the two or three weeks after it. So the hole left by Uncle Timothy's departure is not noticed. And Uncle Timothy sends home from the Falls a colored post card of his honeymoon.
The best Christmas fir tree on a farm where there are probably ten thousand Christmas fir trees goes up to the ceiling in the farm's parlor and has to bend its topmost plume horizontal to fit the festivities. The aunt transfigured by Chicago and culture plays all the familiar carols on the farm's melodeon, for all it is a wheezy antique, with Peter pumping hard at the bellows because the pedals won't work. Peter, Ann, Andrew, Molly, James, Jane, John, and even Baby William, who has only half a dozen words to his name, sing their heads off. Lucy comes over for the afternoon to play blindman's buff and pin the tail on the donkey with her future husband and his brothers and sisters who are the uncles and aunts of her children to come. And joy runs over.
The beechnut brittle, made out of Peter's few beechnuts he was able to snatch from the squirrels, boils over on the kitchen stove while Mother is trying to keep the blindman's-buff players from wrecking her best chairs. The smell of it rolls into the front room, and the whole house smells like Araby the Blest
In the midst of it all, Peter misses something. It is Uncle Cephus. He asks about him. The family suddenly falls silent. Father looks grave. He says maybe the old fellow is under the weather and so cannot come. He goes to the window that looks towards the sea where the twilight has already fallen, shades his hand from the light and looks out. Father turns to the room with a strange face.
There is no light there where one has been for so many years. No light on the schooner frozen into the bay.
Father goes and gets his axe and pole. He goes out alone into the dark. Peter wants to go, but Father says no. The family watch his lantern move along the night. He is gone only a short time. He comes back with news that puts the light of this Christmas out completely. Dark news to end up a year. Uncle Cephus is dead in his bunk.
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