My friend Yulan and I spent some calm and star-watched Christmas Eves together, bright now in the glow of memory.
Bryn Mawr is an old and quiet town on Philadelphia’s fabled Main Line and the Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church on Montgomery Avenue there is likewise old and quiet, stone and stained glass, and the faint and reassuring smell of polished pews.
In communal candled dimness, the windows behind the pulpit became a rich muted backdrop to the blessedly short sermons and the gratifyingly long sacred music from the choir, the organ, and the soloists. It is a very civilized approach to Christmas Eve.
There has always been a stillness about Christmas Eve to me, no matter where I am. Or perhaps there is a stillness within me that Christmas Eve touches. We lived by railroad tracks when I was a child and every night, but especially on Christmas Eve, a long freight train would go by in the small hours before dawn and on Christmas Eve that train became the only thing in the world outside of that great stillness.
That stillness was outside the church in Bryn Mawr, too, almost crystallized in the chilling, snow-topped cold. People wished each other “Merry Christmas” in hushed, soft voices, sensing angels in the air.
Yulan and I went one Christmas Eve to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in the quietly tony Philadelphia section of Chestnut Hill. The Modern Jazz Quartet would be playing at the midnight service there. It was a dry, windless cold, and our breaths were frosty brief wreaths as we walked from the car on Germantown Avenue.
Inside the church, there was the rustle of winter clothes, small coughs and throat-clearings, overlaid on the soft hum of anticipation. The Modern Jazz Quartet, in tuxedos, quietly took the stage and were introduced by pianist John Lewis: Milt Jackson on vibraphone, Percy Heath on double bass, and his brother Albert on drums, replacing Connie Kay, the original drummer who died in 1994.
They played for well over an hour, a restrained baroque blues that mixed traditional carols and jazz standards, and ended with a rendition of “Silent Night” that was so splendidly sacred that no one moved after the last note.
There had been no applause throughout the performance, and the audience rose and now there was, and the MJQ walked through it to the back of the church where they shook everyone’s hand as they left.
Into the perfect stillness.