Midnight Mass

     Ever since we moved to Valley Falls, I've attended Midnight Mass. Later it was called Christmas Eve Mass as the priests grew older and didn't so easily adapt to the late hour, so services were held at 10 or 11 p.m. Of course I have many memories of attending, from early childhood when my parents would play cards with us kids to keep us awake. I recall a game called Pit. I remember feeling thrilled to be up so late and then going out into the night to church. The church would be beautifully decorated, most likely the chief orchestrator being Florence Cassidy throughout most of those years. I remember Loretta Hyland playing the pipe organ and leading the choir, above us in the mysterious choir loft. When we got older, my sister and I sang  in that choir.

    I remember you had to make your Confession prior to Christmas Eve, and the lines of those waiting to enter the Confessional Booth extended all the way up to the altar; there were two curtained boxes with the priest in the middle section. One time during afternoon confessions, we had been playing outside and the Vickery twins, very young, went into the church with us and were waiting in the pew when the priest emerged from the booth for some reason, and both twins dropped down onto the floor in fear and horror;  they were unused to churches and robed figures. 

I recall the church being packed during Midnight Masses, and everybody dressed up. The men wore those felt hats and would put them on the seat behind them. Most parishioners would receive Holy Communion at the midnight services, which carried with it then a lengthy period of fasting, which meant no water either. You can feel really holy when you are sleepy, hungry and thirsty, and music rings in your ears. I enjoyed every minute of it.

  When I say I have many memories of those Christmas Eves, that means I recall them in my mind. I can hearken back and remember those happenings, so long ago. But they are just memories, from a memory bank, like most memories of past life are.

However, there is one Christmas Eve that is not only a distant memory conjured up at will, but it fills my mind and I actually feel the same  way as I did way back then. 

   Dorothy and Sandy and I are walking home from Midnight Mass. We were young teenagers and maybe my parents had attended and ridden home in the car as was their custom. Maybe we three girls had sung in the choir. The Mass could have been at midnight or an hour or so earlier. The priest was undoubtedly familiar to us, but I have no recall of who he was.  Those details are not part of the aura or scene that plays in my mind exactly as then.

   It had snowed, with more additional lighter snowfall while we were in the church. Most of the churchgoers were local, so whatever cars had driven to the church that night had left. This is where the story begins:

  We were walking home, down the middle of the road, our boots crunching the accumulated snow.  The sidewalks were snow filled. We weren't particularly excited about Christmas being the next day; that wasn't such a big deal then. We were all talking. I have no idea  about what.  We had no cares or worries. Homework would not have been an issue during vacation time. Our parents were home, as usual, as they would always be, in the house we'd live in forever, and we had no health issues at all. But none of that was going through our minds. We were just walking at midnight down the middle of the road and talking about  nothing in particular. All I remember that makes that walk on this night so memorable was the streetlights shining on the snow-filled road ahead of us. As we got closer to the bridge, I felt a strange sense of what I would now call nostalgia, but I didn't know what to think of it back then. I just did not want the walk to come to an end. I wished in my mind we could keep on walking, across the bridge to someplace rare and special. Of course, I never mentioned it to the others. Now, at night, when I run out of topics to occupy my mind, the image of that midnight walk appears in my mind, and I feel the same unnamed emotion from that long ago walk , where it seemed that something mysterious and wonderful lay ahead if I could only keep walking toward it.