Solstice

[From Jack Kerouac's Home At Christmas, first published in 1961]

"[…] now the Snow King has laid his drape upon the world, locked it in new silence, all you hear is the profound higher-than-human-ear screaming of snow radios bedazzling and electrifying the air like orgones and spermatazoas in a Universe Dance ― They start black specks from heaven, swirl to avoid my gaze, fall white and ploppy on my nose ― I turn my face up to the sweet kiss of Heaven ―

[...]

Somewhere above, the coalblack crow is yawking, cr-a-a-a-ck, c-r-a-a-ck, I see the flop of raven twit limbs battering onward through treetop twigs of aeril white to a hole in the heart of the forest, to the central pine and pain of my aching desire, the real Christmas is hiding somewhere from me and it is still, it is holy, it is dark, it is insane, the crow broods there, some Nativity darker than Christianity, with Wise Men from underground, a Virgin Mary of the ice and snow, a Joseph of the tress, a Jesus like a star ― a Bethlehem of pinecones, rocks, snakes ― Stonewalls, eyes ―

[...] 

Everything is saved.  There's heat and warm joy in my house.  I linger at the window looking in.  My heart breaks to see they're moving so slowly, with such dear innocence within, they don’t realize time and death will catch them ― not now."

A little Christmas entertainment

[Taken from The New Traveler's Almanac, in Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume 2]

"We headed on without event, though rather slowly, and at sunset yesterday we glimpsed what proved to be the claw-carved ice caves that comprise the region called Polar Bear Kingdom, where we were intrigued to find the gentle yet ferocious-looking ursine natives quite conversant with the English language […] they told us how they had been lately visited by representatives of an American who manufactured phosphate drinks and was most anxious in securing the pictorial rights to any suitably appealing bear activity, for purposes of advertising.  They said also that the representatives had next struck further north in hope of finding an elusive polar witch-doctor with whom they sought to make a similar agreement.  As of yet, the men had not returned

[…]

[...] we struck north and shortly blundered into yet more sense-defying circumstances, coming on a strange and mournful figure crouched before a deer-hide wigwam howling penitently.  Nearby was the body of another person (an American, we later learned) in modern arctic clothing, who'd been partly torn to pieces, as if by some form of animal.  The wild-eyed, bearded fellow, we discovered, was the same witch-doctor that our friends had warned us of, though he seemed far too stricken by remorse to do us harm.  He wore, as his magician’s robe, a fresh-flayed reindeer hide reversed so that the skin was outermost, its bloody red by now turned almost black, lined by the fur inside that stuck out in a trim around the garment’s edge.  The beast's head formed a cowl, the antlers jutting there above his lined, grey-bearded face.  He told us between moans of anguish that he was the ‘sha-man’ of the North Pole, charged at the mid-winter solstice with delivering the gift of cheer to all the homes on Earth, his disembodied soul darting around the globe born by his flying spirit animals while all the time his body lies here in his wigwam, raving mad and stained with vomit from the mind-affecting spotted mushrooms that he must take to achieve his trance.  Apparently, this Christmas past, his trance was interrupted by two rash Americans who represented the same phosphate-drink concern the polar bears had told us of.  This breach of the magician’s most important yearly ritual was met by the witch-doctor’s fierce invisible familiars, or ‘little helpers’ as he called them, who had torn one of the representatives into the shreds we saw a short way off.  The other fled, but only after reassuring the frantically-apologizing witch-man that his actions did not constitute a reason to break off their hoped-for future business dealings."